2017 IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award
Acceptance Remarks

Jeffrey Heer — October 3, 2017
Award Citation

Research does not occur in a vacuum, and the work underlying this award is due in large part to the many people I have had the good fortune to work with.

I've had a fantastic cadre of mentors, including James Landay, Marti Hearst, Jock Mackinlay, Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Viégas, George Robertson, Maneesh Agrawala, Joe Hellerstein, and Pat Hanrahan. Truly an embarrassment of riches!

I owe a singular debt to my intellectual role model Stu Card. Stu shaped my perspective on research and helped me to look beyond the raw nuts and bolts of system building. Toolkits not only codify knowledge, but through their design instantiate a theory of doing. Systems researchers should seek to not only architect new technologies, but articulate, interrogate, and evaluate theories of use.

The projects I've been a part of bear the imprint of many collaborators.

My graduate school classmate Alan Newberger helped guide the early days of the Prefuse visualization toolkit. Not incidentally, Alan also introduced me to the music of the electronica artist Prefuse 73, from whom – following the logic of "you are what you eat" – derived the name of the toolkit.

I'm immensely grateful to have collaborated on Protovis and later D3 with Mike Bostock, who continues to do ground-breaking work. Mike's contributions to both our field and the world at large have been tremendous. This includes not only his role as the creator of D3, but years of community development and support, hundreds of examples, and the fine work produced as a graphics editor at the New York Times. I encourage you to join me in nominating Mike for a future offering of this same award. It is well-deserved.

I would also like to acknowledge the exceptional work of my collaborators on the Vega and Vega-Lite languages. This includes recent PhD graduate Arvind Satyanarayan – soon headed to a faculty position at MIT – and the dynamic duo of Dominik Moritz and Kanit "Ham" Wongsuphasawat.

Over the years I've drawn inspiration from a number of other visualization toolkit and language projects. This includes Jean-Daniel Fekete's InfoVis Toolkit, Chris Weaver's work on Improvise, and Hadley Wickham's work on ggplot2. As a discipline we advance not by individual tools alone, but by the strength of the larger ecosystem.

Finally, my greatest motivation and gratification has come from the amazing work of the visualization community, both researchers and practitioners — including many of you in the room today. If my collaborators and I are makers of instruments, it is you who are the makers of music. Thank you for helping bring data to life.