Jim Thomas
President and CEO, Discover Visual Analytics (DVA)
1939 Peach Tree Lane
Richland, WA 99352
Phone: (509)627-3014
Email: Thomas_J@charter.net
DVP term expires December 2012
Jim Thomas is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow and Laboratory Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with over 35 years of experience. Jim just received the 2009 prestigious Christopher Columbus Award in the US Capital for his contributions in creating the next science of visual analytics and it’s impact national and homeland security. Mr. Thomas is founder and past Director of a Department of Homeland Security National Visualization and Analytics Center. His responsibilities at PNNL include establishing investment directions for Information and Computing Technology (ICT), representing ICT in and outside PNNL, leading major technology initiatives, mentoring staff, and being a PI on several major science programs. He has a broad working knowledge of information technology, but he specializes in the research, design, and implementation of innovative information and scientific and analytic visualization, multimedia, and human computer interaction technologies. Recently developed technologies set a new stage for visualization of masses of multimedia information sources. Mr. Thomas has numerous patents and extensive publications, with several publications being widely referenced and re-printed. More recently he has led teams in text, numerical, image, and video analysis for massive information spaces. Jim recently won the prestigious Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation for Homeland Security award presented at the US Capital, Oct 2009. He has received several international science awards including "Top 100 Scientific Innovators" (Science Digest), two R&D 100 awards (1986 and 1996) presented annually for the 100 most technologically significant products and advancements, and two Federal Laboratory Consortium Technology Transfer Awards (1989 and 1999) for innovation in transferring research technology to industry and universities.
Visual Analytics: A Grand Challenge in Science - Turning Information Overload into the Opportunity of the Decade
Visual Analytics is an emerging field of study that brings talents from many disciplines including statistics, mathematics, knowledge representation and synthesis, scientific and information visualization, cognitive and perceptual sciences, communications, decision sciences and more. The demand for visual analytics is being stimulated by new requirements for homeland security but similar needs are present in science, commerce, home, and almost any domain that deals with complex, large information sources that require human judgement to “detect the expected and discover the unexpected”. The definition of visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by the interface visual interface. Jim will present the new needs for basic science, referenced from the recent book Illuminating the Path: the Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics, http://nvac.pnl.gov/. Jim will also discuss the driving new characteristics of interaction and suggest the top technical challenges for visual analytics, enlisting comments and recommendations.
Visual Analytics Techniques that Enable Knowledge Discovery: Detecting the Expected and Discovery of the Unexpected
The original motivations and goals of the Science of Visual Analytics will be described. These have stimulated new science and deployed visual analytics technology suites over the first few years. The early interest in visual analytics technologies is rapidly growing with several systems being deployed (used by 10s to 10s of thousand of users). These visual analytics technologies demonstrate approaches enabling new analytic methods for knowledge discovery. Six technology suites are reviewed with more than 10 common visual analytics characteristics identified. The systems covered unstructured text, large graphs, financial, mobile, and many more types of analytics. Within these technology suites the common characteristics illustrate how, to date, scientists have brought forth new capabilities enabling analytics of very large and complex information spaces, yet much is to be done. Specific examples and video segments bring new technologies to life. These also naturally lead to the top ten technology challenges in visual analytics that will be provided as fuel for discussions.
Science of Visualization leading to Visual Analytics Foundations
Computer Graphics, Scientific Visualization, Information Visualization, and now Visual Analytics have a long and growing impact on our ability to interact and make decisions from our information spaces. This talk will provide the historical perspective and lead to the development of the science of visual analytics. This was initially published in the book, “Illuminating the Path: the R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics”, ed Thomas and Cook. This stimulated about $100M in international investments into the field with many advances leading to deployed systems. More recently this technology has attracted interested from disciplines in energy, environment, health, finance, every day WWW analytics, etc. These and many more will be described illustrating wide applications. The Fall 2009 issue of Journal of Information Visualization: Foundations and Frontiers in Visual Analytics has 9 papers describes the 2010 to 2020 future and challenges in the science of visual analytics. Jim led this production and will provide additional insight into the future and the top ten challenges in this emerging field of science.
