Fernanda Bertini Viégas (born 1971) is a Brazilian computer scientist and graphical designer, whose work focuses on the social, collaborative and artistic aspects of

information visualization Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, a ...

Biography

Viégas studied graphic design and art history at the

University of Kansas The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and several satellite campuses, research and educational centers, medical centers, and classes across the state of Kansas. T ...

, where she obtained her bachelor's degree in 1997. She then moved to the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

, where she received an M.S. in 200 and a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences in 2005 under the supervision of

Judith Donath Judith Stefania Donath (born May 7, 1962) is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and the founder of the ''Sociable Media Group'' at the MIT Media Lab. She has written papers on various aspects of the Internet and its social impact, such as Int ...

. The same year she began work at IBM's

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and wit ...

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

, as part of the Visual Communication Lab. In April 2010, she and Martin M. Wattenberg started a new venture called Flowing Media, Inc., to focus on visualization aimed at consumers and mass audiences. Four months later, both of them joined Google as the co-leaders of the Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Work

Social visualization

Viégas began her research while at the

, focusing on

graphical interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

s for online communication. Her Chat Circles system introduced ideas such as proximity-based filtering of conversation and a visual archive of chat history displaying the overall rhythm and form of a conversation. Her

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

visualization designs (including PostHistory and Themail) are the foundation for many other systems; her findings on how visualizations are often used for storytelling influenced subsequent work on the collaborative aspects of visualization. While at MIT, she also studied usage of

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

and

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

Collective intelligence and public visualization

A second stream of work, in partnership with Martin Wattenberg, centers on collective intelligence and the public use of data visualization. Her work with visualizations such as History Flow and Chromogram led to some of the earliest publications on the dynamics of Wikipedia, including the first scientific study of the repair of

vandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The term ...

. Viégas is one of the founders of IBM's experimental Many Eyes website, created in 2007, which seeks to make visualization technology accessible to the public. In addition to broad uptake from individuals, the technology from Many Eyes has been used by nonprofits and news outlets such as the New York Times Visualization Lab.

Art

Viégas is also known for her artistic work, which explores the medium of visualization for explorations of emotionally charged digital data. An early example is Artifacts of the Presence Era, an interactive installation at the Boston Center for the Arts in 2003, which featured a video-based timeline of visitor interactions with the museum. She often works with Martin Wattenberg to visualize emotionally charged information. An example of these works is their piece "Web Seer", which is a visualization of Google Suggest. The Fleshmap series (started in 2008) uses visualization to portray aspects of sensuality, and includes work on the web, video, and installations. In 2012, she launched th
Wind Map project
which displays continuously updated forecasts of wind patterns across the United States.

Publications

* ''Chat Circles''. Fernanda B. Viégas and Judith Donath. ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), 1999 * ''Visualizing Conversations,'' Judith Donath, Karrie Karahalios and Fernanda B. Viégas . Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 4, Number 4, June 1999 * ''Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations.'' Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave. ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), 2004 * ''Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale.'' Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Frank van Ham, Jesse Kriss, Matt McKeon. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2007 * "Luscious". Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg. Book chapter in Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design. Ed. xtine burrough, Routledge 2011 * "Beautiful History". Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg. Book chapter in Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data Through the Eyes of Experts. Ed. Julie Steele, Noah Iliinsky. O'Reilly Media, 2010.Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data Through the Eyes of Experts. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920000617.do

References

External links

Fernanda B. Viégas
Personal home page for Viégas

listed on IBM's site.
Many Eyes
Experimental public visualization site. {{DEFAULTSORT:Viegas, Fernanda 1971 births Living people Information visualization experts Human–computer interaction Human–computer interaction researchers Brazilian contemporary artists Brazilian digital artists Women digital artists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni IBM employees Brazilian women scientists Brazilian scientists People from Cambridge, Massachusetts Google employees Technology company founders American company founders American women company founders Brazilian women company founders Brazilian designers MIT Media Lab people 21st-century Brazilian women artists 21st-century Brazilian artists 21st-century American women University of Kansas alumni