Prof. Georges Grinstein – Why is his research so important and what does he tell his grandchildren?

I had the chance to interview Prof. Grinstein after his talk ‘Visual Analytics: A Modern View of its Future and Research Opportunities’ at the University of Konstanz in June 2017, when he visited Prof. Daniel A. Keim and his project team within the SFB-TRR 161.

Georges Grinstein is a member of the UMass Amherst Computer Science Department and Center for Data Science. Prior to his joining UMass he was Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, head of its Bioinformatics Program and Director of its Institute for Visualization and Perception Research.

Apart from serving as a chair or co-chair for major visualization and visual-analytics related conferences and review panels, he provides tutorials and training sessions many times per year. He has had over 300 research grants, products in use nationally and internationally, several patents, numerous publications in journals and conferences, co-authored several textbooks on visualization and visual analytics, founded several companies, directed the development of Weave, an open source web-based visualization system, and has served as a consultant to NIST, NASA, DARPA, USAF, PNNL, CDC, IBM, Pfizer, and Boehringer Ingelheim among many others and now with STRATCOM, Serono/Merck and Bristol Meyers Squibb. He has given numerous keynotes, and mentored over 40 doctoral students and hundreds of graduate students. He has been on the editorial boards of several journals in Computer Graphics and Data Mining, a member of ANSI and ISO, and a NATO Expert.

In my interview, he was answering questions like “Why is research in the field of computer science, data visualization and visual analytics so important?”, “What are the major risks of visualization and visual analytics in the future?”, “What do we have to teach our children to make them fit for the future world?”, or “What challenges does Georges Grinstein still have?”

Listen to the complete 22-minute-interview and take part in his rich portfolio of life experiences!

Thanks a lot to Prof. Georges Grinstein to spend his time in talking about his live and work!