My (and Gordon Kindlmann’s) submission was accepted to VIS 2014! I’m super happy about this one: it is both the culmination of a five-year discussion (we have the notes to show it!) and, I believe, the beginning of a whole lot of interesting research.

The good news for all three of you reading this thing is that the big hiatus on the graph visualization series happened, ultimately, because Gordon and I noticed we needed to write this paper instead of spending time attempting to explain and understand visualizations in their own specific settings. If you were reading those pieces, you might recognize the axiom and the other axiom from part 3. It took a long of wrong turns, but I think we now have a setting where we can actually explain many tradeoffs in graph visualization and in many other problem domains. I am planning to write about the paper here, and I will probably reboot the graph drawing series in the meantime.

The other piece of news is that I’ve just arrived in Tucson, and this is my first week as an assistant prof at the University of Arizona’s CS department. I had five great years at AT&T Research, but I’m really excited about research, teaching, and outreach here. I’m also hoping to write more about the process. Thankfully, I’m not teaching this fall, but I need to plan a vis course for spring 2015. Have you taken or taught a vis course that you loved (or hated!)? I want to hear from you.

I’m also looking for grad students and postdocs! Do you like thinking about the computational problems that arise when humans meet data? Do you like building software to make an academic point? Please come talk to me.