Jack van Wijk

Jack van Wijk is full professor in visualization at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His current research interests are information visualization and visual analytics. Previously he worked on flow visualization and mathematical visualization. The challenges are enabling people to explore and understand large amounts of abstract data (information visualization) and integrating  methods and techniques from statistics, machine learning, and data mining to deal with even larger data sets (visual analytics).

Van Wijk’s work spans many aspects of visualization - representation, interaction, evaluation, and methodology - for a wide variety of applications and data types. He is known for his work on hierarchical data and network visualization. With his students, he has developed new techniques for treemaps, exploring large image collections, event data, vessel traffic, and medicine prescriptions. His current focus is on visually explaining the results of automated methods. Useful results have been obtained for dealing with decision trees and models for judging vessel behavior, the next aim is to develop more generic methods. 

The main challenge is to understand needs, strengths, and limitations of people, in such a way that we can develop powerful methods to support them in their exploration of large and complex data sets. Data science is about people, not about data.”