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Georges Grinstein (1946-2018)
About
Georges Grinstein was Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, head of its Bioinformatics Program, Director of its Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, and worked with the Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1978. Grinstein passed away unexpectedly on Monday, February 26, 2018.
His work was broad and interdisciplinary, covering the perceptual and cognitive foundations of visualization, very high-dimensional data visualization, visual analytics, and applications of visualization, all focused on the modeling, analysis, visualization and presentation of complex information. The goal was to optimize human understanding, learning, memory, impact, interpretation and decision-making. His most recent work was goal directed cognition of static and interactive visualizations.
He had over 40 years in academia with extensive consulting, over 300 research grants, products in use nationally and internationally, several patents, several hundred publications in journals and conferences, books on data visualization, founded several companies, been the organizer or chair of national and international conferences and workshops in Computer Graphics, in Visualization, and in Data Mining. He has given numerous keynotes and mentored over 40 doctoral students and hundreds of graduate students. He was on the editorial boards of several journals in Computer Graphics and Data Mining, a member of ANSI and ISO, a NATO Expert, and a technology consultant for numerous government agencies and commercial organizations.
For the last ten years of his career, he co-chaired the IEEE VAST Challenges in visual analytics leading to new research areas. He also developed and taught new courses, one of which Radical Design focused on how to develop radical new products instead of evolutionary ones. He was a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Center of Excellence CCICADA (Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis), and directed the development of Weave, an open source web-based interactive collaborative visual analytics system incorporating numerous innovations.