Jeffrey Michael Heer

Digital Library

ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

USA - 2016

citation

For developing visualization languages that have fundamentally changed the way people build and interact with charts and graphs across the Web.

Heer's most impactful work is on developing visualization languages that have fundamentally changed the way people build and interact with charts and graphs.  Interactive visualizations are difficult to create because they require expertise in user interface development, graphical design, and algorithmic implementation. Heer and his collaborators have released a series of visualization languages — Prefuse (2005), Flare (2007), Protovis (2009), and Vega (2013) — designed to address these difficulties by providing the basic programmatic building blocks for creating interactive charts and graphs. Heer also contributed to the development of D3.js (2011). This work has pushed the field of data visualization from a focus on simple data graphs to a set of abstractions that have made complicated visualizations easier to build.   Tens of thousands of developers have used the tools to produce visualizations across a variety of media websites and millions of people have interacted with the resulting visualizations.  Heer's work has thus had an unusually direct and significant impact on a wide community of software developers and users.

Press Release

2016 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

Jeffrey Heer was honored for developing visualization languages that have changed the way people build and interact with charts and graphs across the Web. With the meteoric increase of data collection in recent years, tools are urgently needed to understand and see patterns within data. Jeffrey Heer, a Professor at the University of Washington, has been a leader in developing computer languages to create charts, graphs and other visualizations that help people explore and understand data. Heer’s earliest project, Prefuse, was developed in 2004 and became one of the first developer-friendly software packages for producing interactive visualizations. His later work with Mike Bostock on Protovis (2009) contributed a groundbreaking high-level language for Web-native data visualization. Heer then contributed to the development of Bostock’s subsequent D3.js (2011). D3.js quickly became the primary tool for creating interactive visualizations on the Web, and is used every day by thousands of Web developers worldwide. The Vega project, Heer's most recent contribution, builds on this earlier work to develop new representations that enable both human designers and automated algorithms to rapidly produce a wide range of interactive graphics. Data analytics firms and major media companies regularly publish visualizations created with these languages to engage millions of viewers. Importantly, Heer and his collaborators have made all of their visualization tools widely available as open source software.

The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award is given to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize of $35,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made. Financial support for this award is provided by Microsoft.