Dr. Jerry Alan Fails, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boise State University, has been awarded the first IEEE VAST (Visual Analytics Science and Technology) Conference Test of Time Award for a 2006 article “A Visual Interface for Multivariate Temporal Data: Finding Patterns of Events across Multiple Histories.” This award goes to a paper from the IEEE VAST conference 10 years prior that has had a significant impact in terms of citations, influence, uptake and overall effect on the visual analytics community.
This paper presented PatternFinder, an integrated interface for visual query and result-set visualization enabling the search and discovery of temporal patterns within multivariate and categorical data sets. PatternFinder’s query capabilities coupled with its visualizations enabled users to effectively query, explore, and analyze event patterns both within and across data entities (e.g. patient histories, terrorist groups, weblogs, etc.). The paper has been highly cited in the field and has inspired further explorations into enabling the search of patterns in data through visual queries and result-set visualizations.
This award was given at the opening of the 2016 IEEE VAST Conference in Baltimore, MD on October 25th. Ben Shneiderman, a co-author, accepted the award in-person.