Plaisant Elected to ACM SIGCHI Academy

A senior research scientist in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) was just recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) for her pioneering work in human-computer interaction and information visualization by her election into the SIGCHI Academy.

Catherine Plaisant joins eight other researchers in the 2015 cohort of SIGCHI Academy honorees, all of whom have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.

"We could not be more pleased with Catherine being honored for her research and scholarship. Her outstanding record of collaboration and innovation in HCI resonates throughout our academic community," says Amitabh Varshney, director of UMIACS.

Much of the work by Plaisant, who also serves as the associate director of research in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), involves research on the design and evaluation of novel user interfaces.

"Her accomplishments span the development lifecycle with major work in requirements gathering, interface design, and rigorous evaluations across a range of methods," notes longtime collaborator Ben Shneiderman, a Distinguished University Professor of computer science.

Plaisant and Shneiderman co-authored the 4th and 5th editions of "Designing the User Interface," one of the major books on the topic of human-computer interaction.

Recently, Plaisant devised ways to make it easier for doctors and healthcare workers to manage patients and their medications. In collaboration with Shneiderman, the research focuses on improving the interface design of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, which involves developing prototypes that are finding their ways into commercial applications.

Plaisant is also continuing her work on EventFlow, a tool developed by HCIL, that helps medical researchers analyze and explore patterns of temporal events in databases of patient history records and other information sources.

Plaisant will be honored in April at the ACM’s CHI 2015 Conference in Seoul, Korea.

She joins two other UMIACS faculty who have received the ACM SIGCHI designation: Shneiderman (2001) and Ben Bederson (2012).

Learn more about the SIGCHI awards, here.

Learn more about Plaisant and Shneiderman’s work with EHR systems in this video.

Learn more about HCIL in this video.