Maneesh Agrawala, an associate professor of computer sciences at the University of California, Berkley, has received a MacArthur “genius” grant. Agrawala specializes in the development of algorithms to automatically generate effective design visualizations for a variety of data. His graduate work was on LineDrive, an automated system to render route maps in a way that simplifies the map, removing unnecessary details. The technology was presented at the 2001 SIGGRAPH event, and was subsequently incorporated into MapPoint Driving Directions.
Agrawala has also developed a program to generate assembly instructions and to visualize and communicate 3D schematics that allow users to explore spatial relationships. The work that is presented in his YouTube background video outlines an easy means for children to use drawings on paper with video capture to create an animated story. Agrawala won the Significant New Research award at SIGGRAPH 2008.
It’s great to see his creative and far-ranging application of different visualization techniques from mapping, to schematics, to animation. The targeted users of these different visualization projects are very diverse, but each different approach displays an elegant simplification of complex visualization challenges.
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