astronomy

Jock D. Mackinlay

Jock D. Mackinlay is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Jock D. Mackinlay rather than just read about it. In short: Jock D. Mackinlay (born August 16, 1952) is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software.

Key takeaways

Jock D. Mackinlay belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Jock D. Mackinlay to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Jock D. Mackinlay from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Jock D. Mackinlay (born August 16, 1952) is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software. With Stuart Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of information visualization techniques.

Education Jock Mackinlay was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and received his BA in mathematics and computer science from UC Berkeley in 1975 and his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1986, where he pioneered the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information.

Career In 1976, Mackinlay started working as a systems analyst for the Bank of America in San Francisco. In 1977 he became a systems analyst at Minimax Research Corporation. From 1979 to 1986 he was a research assistant at Stanford University while getting his PhD. In 1986 he joined Xerox PARC, where he collaborated with the User Interface Research Group to develop many novel applications of computer graphics for information access, coining the term "information visualization". Much of the fruits of this research can be seen in his 1999 published book, Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, written and edited with Stuart Card and Ben Shneiderman. In 2000, Mackinlay took a year-long sabbatical from Xerox PARC to work as a visiting professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he taught courses in Information Visualization and User Interfaces of Mobile Devices (co-taught with Polle Zellweger). In 2003, Mackinlay was on Chris Stolte's dissertation committee at Stanford along with Professor Pat Hanrahan. Stolte and Hanrahan had extended Mackinlay's dissertation to a formal specification language that combines query, analysis, and visualization into a single framework. They went on to found Tableau Software after Stolte graduated. Mackinlay joined Tableau Software in 2004 as Director of Visual Analysis. He holds numerous patents in user interfaces and visual analysis.

Research and awards Mackinlay has been an active member of the academic research community since the late 1980s. He was UIST'91 program chair and UIST'92 conference chair, and was papers co-chair for CHI'96. He was also on the editorial boards for ACM TOCHI (1997-2003) and IEEE CG&A (2004-6). He has received many awards for his work, including the best paper award at IEEE Visual Languages 1998 (co-authored with Polle Zellweger, Bay-Wei Chang, and Takeo Igarashi). In 2005, Mackinlay won DMReview's data visualization competition. In 2009, he received the Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee for his seminal technical work on automatic presentation tools and new visual metaphors for information visualization. Mackinlay became an ACM Distinguished Member in 2013. In 2023, Mackinlay was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, "For contributions to the fields of computational data visualization and information visualization".

See also Information visualization reference model Prefuse Visual analytics Interactive visual analysis

Publications Books:

1999. Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think. With Stuart K. Card and Ben Shneiderman. Morgan Kaufmann. Articles:

1986. "Automating the Design of Graphical Presentations of Relational Information". in: ACM Transactions on Graphics. 5(2, April), 110-141. 1989. "The cognitive coprocessor architecture for interactive user interfaces". With S. K. Card, and George G. Robertson. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pages 10–18. ACM Press, Nov 1989. 1991. "Cone Trees: Animated 3D Visualizations of Hierarchical Information". With George G. Robertson and Stuart K. Card. In: Robertson, Scott P., Olson, Gary M. and Olson, Judith S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 28 - June 5, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana. pp. 189–194. 1993. "Information Visualization Using 3D Interactive Animation". With Stuart K. Card, and George G. Robertson. In: Communications of the ACM, 36(4), April 1993. pp. 57–71. 1993. "The document lens". With George G. Robertson. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. ACM Press, Nov 1993. 2000. "Opportunities for Information Visualization". In: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 20(1). 2004. "Log-based Longitudinal Study Finds Window Thrashing". With C. Royer. 2007. "Show me: Automatic presentation for visual analysis". With Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte. In: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 13(6). 2008. "Graphical histories for visualization: Supporting analysis, communication, and evaluation". With J Heer, C Stolte, M Agrawala. In: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 14(6). 2009. “Information visualization”. With Stuart Card, B Shneiderman. In: Human-computer interaction: Design issues, solutions, and applications 181 2013. “Storytelling: The next step for visualization”. With R Kosara. In: Computer 46(5) pp. 44–50 .

References

External links [1] Introduction at tableausoftware.com.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Jock D. Mackinlay

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Jock D. Mackinlay claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Jock D. Mackinlay before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Jock D. Mackinlay ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Jock D. Mackinlay

In research: Jock D. Mackinlay appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Jock D. Mackinlay in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Jock D. Mackinlay is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1952 births, Data and information visualization experts, Human–computer interaction researchers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Jock D. Mackinlay outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Jock D. Mackinlay in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Jock D. Mackinlay means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Jock D. Mackinlay out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Jock D. Mackinlay in simple terms?

Jock D. Mackinlay (born August 16, 1952) is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software.

Why does Jock D. Mackinlay matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Jock D. Mackinlay?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Jock D. Mackinlay.