Catherine Plaisant

Catherine Plaisant is a senior research scientist emerita for UMIACS and the former associate director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL).

Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of novel user interfaces.

She first worked in France at the "Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressources Humaines" in Paris, developing learning environments for pre-school children and conducting evaluation in classrooms. In 1988, she joined Distinguished University Professor of computer science Ben Shneiderman at HCIL, where she now works with multidisciplinary teams on designing and evaluating new interface technologies that are useable and useful. Research contributions range from focused user interaction techniques (e.g. Excentric Labeling) to innovative visualizations (such as LifeLines for personal records or SpaceTree for hierarchical data exploration) and interactive search interface techniques, such as Query Previews. Those interaction techniques have been carefully validated with user studies and are finding applications in industry, government information systems and digital libraries.

Plaisant has more than 200 published papers, mostly in leading journals and conferences, on diverse subjects such as information visualization, digital libraries, universal access, image browsing, digital humanities, technology for families, or evaluation methodologies.

Along with Shneiderman, she co-authored the 4th, 5th and 6th editions of "Designing the User Interface", one of the major books on the topic of human-computer interaction.

In 2015 she was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy recognizing principal leaders in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. In 2018 she was awarded an INRIA International Chair, and in 2020 she received the IEEE VIS Career Award and the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award.

She received a Doctorat d'Ingenieur degree in France in 1982.

Go here to view Plaisant's academic publications on Google Scholar.