The Diagrams steering committee contains experts from a variety of backgrounds, reflecting the multi-disciplinary nature of the conference.
The Steering Committee is responsible for:
Terms of membership are for six years (although multiple terms are permitted). The General Chair, Program Chairs and Local Chair of a Diagrams conference are automatically invited to become Steering Committee members when the conference has run. A further two members are chosen every two years. Nominations will be called for on the Diagrams mailing list and, if more nominations than places are received, members of the Steering Committee and Program Committee members of the last three Diagrams conferences will vote on the nominations.
Steering Committee Members
The current members are all listed below, together with the dates of their current term.
Dave Barker-Plummer (2006 - 2012)
I am the project manager of the Openproof project at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. My research concerns artificial intelligence approaches to the study and teaching of reasoning, specifically formal, mathematical reasoning. I am particularly interested in the uses of diagrammatic representations in formal reasoning, and have studied both the natural representations used by mathematicians, and worked on the development of artificial formal representations. One particular interest is the understanding of heterogeneous reasoning, that is, reasoning that requires the use of information expressed in multiple different representations to solve a single problem.
B. Chandrasekaran (2009 - 2015)
I'm Professor Emeritus of Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. Over three decades of research in AI and Cognitive Science, I have become increasingly convinced that perception plays a much bigger role in our cognitive activities than is implied by the exclusive commitment to predicate-symbolic representations in theories of cognitive architecture. In addition to its obvious function as a source of information about the external world, our perceptual machinery is deployed in imagining, and imagining is crucially involved in thinking. The area of diagrammatic reasoning serves for me as both a window into the more general issue of the role of perception in cognition, and as a rich arena of practical applications. My students and I at The Ohio State University are involved in the development of theories, architectures and applications involving diagrams.
Richard Cox (2006 - 2012)
I co-founded the Representation and Cognition Research Group in the Dept of Informatics at the University of Sussex. My research focuses on the ways in which external representations such as diagrams support reasoning and problem solving, especially in educational contexts. I am particularly interested in individual differences. My recent work has been concerned with information processing approaches to the assessment of graphical `literacy' and with the study of 3-way interactions between
I am particularly interested in the development and implementation of adaptive e-learning systems that help learners make good representational choices.
Stephanie Elzer (2009 - 2015)
I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Millersville University, and my research interests include Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. My research has focused on information graphics (graphs, specifically bar charts, appearing in popular media) as a form of language with a communicative intention. By applying natural language techniques to understanding information graphics, we can make them more broadly accessible, such as to visually impaired individuals and for indexing and searching in digital libraries. Through the process of modeling the communicative signals inherent in information graphics, we also come to better understand the cognitive and perceptual aspects of graph design. I enjoy an active and ongoing collaboration with a group at the University of Delaware dedicated to furthering this research.
Ashok Goel (2010 - 2016)
I lead the Design & Intelligence Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. We conduct research into computational design and creativity. The goals of our research are to model human creativity in practical tasks such as conceptual design of complex systems, and develop interactive tools for aiding humans in creative tasks. Our research explores analogical reasoning, visual reasoning, and meta-reasoning as fundamental processes of creativity. Our work on visual reasoning focuses on visual and multimodal analogies in design, problem solving, and diagram understanding. For example, we have shown that visual analogy problems that appear on intelligence tests, such as Miller’s analogy test and Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, and that had been assumed to require propositional representations, can be solved using only visual representations. We are investigating how solving visual analogy problems on intelligence tests can make use of both propositional and visual representations.
John Howse (2008 - 2014)
I am the leader of the Visual Modelling Group at the University of Brighton, UK. My research focus lies in the broad area of diagrammatic representations of logic, particularly in the development of formal reasoning systems. I am particularly interested in designing visual notations for modelling software precisely. By providing accessible notations, software should become more reliable and fit for purpose. Tools to support the use of diagrammatic modelling notations are highly desirable and their implementation brings with it a variety of challenges, such as the production of algorithms that produce good diagram layouts, which is another aspect of my research.
Mateja Jamnik (2010 - 2016)
I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge (UK) and hold the EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship "Automating Informal Human Mathematical Reasoning". My PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh, "Automating Diagrammatic Proofs of Arithmetic Arguments" broke new ground in automated reasoning. I was invited by CSLI Press, Stanford, to write a book about this work -- Mathematical Reasoning with Diagrams: From Intuition to Automation (2001). My work focuses on exploring how people solve problems in mathematics, in particular with the use of diagrams. I computationally model this type of reasoning, thus trying to enable machines to reason in a similar way to humans. Very few systems attempt to benefit from the power of such human techniques. In my work, I aim to do just that: integrate informal human reasoning techniques, such as the use of diagrams, with the proven successful formal techniques, such as different types of logic.
John Lee (2008 - 2014)
I am Professor of Digital Media at the University of Edinburgh, where my time is divided between Informatics and Architecture (in the Edinburgh College of Art). I have long-standing interests in uses of diagrams in reasoning, and various kinds of non-linguistic representations in cognition and design. I am particularly interested in relationships between the formal or logical characterisation of diagrams or diagrammatic systems and the cognitive implications of using them in practice. This extends to implications for the design of technology intended to support such uses.
Mark Minas (2008 - 2014)
I am Professor of Computer Science at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany. My research has focused on tools that support creation, editing, and visualization of diagrams, in particular in computer science. I am interested in various aspects of such diagramming tools, for instance the way in which diagrams are edited (e.g., by a standard GUI or by sketching), how such tools support the user during diagram creation (e.g., error reports and user assistance), or how diagrams can be automatically layouted. I am particularly interested in tools that allow for (automatically) generating such diagramming tools from a specification and thus make it easier to create such diagramming tools.
Hari Narayanan (2010 - 2016)
I am Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University, USA. My research on diagrammatic representation and
reasoning includes an investigation of human and machine reasoning with diagrams (PhD dissertation), protocol analysis studies of diagrammatic reasoning (with Suwa and Motoda), development of a cognitive process model of diagrams+text comprehension (with Mary Hegarty), design and evaluation of algorithm animations for learning computer science, and eye tracking studies of diagrammatic reasoning in mechanical problem solving. I have been active in the diagrams community since 1992, when I organized the first US meeting on the topic (AAAI Spring Symposium on Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations chaired by Chandrasekaran and the late Herbert Simon), which resulted in the 1995 AAAI/MIT Press book Diagrammatic Reasoning: Cognitive and Computational Perspectives (Glasgow, Narayanan & Chandrasekaran, Eds.). More information about me can be found here.
Ian Oliver (2011 - 2017)
I am the Chief Architect for Privacy in Nokia's Location and Commerce organisation and formerly a Principal Architect with Nokia Research. My areas of work are, and have, included developing architectures and infrastructure for privacy, information processing and semantics, Semantic Web infrastructures, formal methods, formal language design and software-hardware co-design. My interests in the area of diagrammatic systems are focused on the ease of communication of concepts through diagrams, particularly in the areas of privacy, semantics and information processing.
Helen Purchase (2011 - 2017)
I am Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. My main research interest is in the evaluation of information visualisation techniques, and in particular, graph drawings (of various types). My work is strongly empirically based, and I have conducted experimental research with colleagues in a range of areas, including sketched graph drawing, biological networks, space-filling graph visualisations, animated dynamic graphs, visual aesthetics, and Euler diagrams. On a broader level, I am interested in experimental methods for HCI and how such methods develop within a research area over time - informed by experiences, successful or not. I enjoy the challenges of designing robust and valid experiments, and in encouraging and advising others to do the same. Recently, as part of my research into the aesthetics of interface design, I have become more interested in image processing metrics, and, in particular, whether it is possible for such metrics to be able to characterise aspects of human perception.
Gem Stapleton (2008 - 2014)
I am a Reader in Computer Science and member of the Visual Modelling Group at the University of Brighton. Broadly speaking, my research aims to provide a more complete theoretical understanding of diagrams. Mostly, I investigate Euler diagrams, spider diagrams and constraint diagrams (which are designed for formal software specification). My interests include establishing properties of diagrammatic logics, such as their expressiveness, decidability and completeness. I have also conducted research on automated reasoning using diagrams and used principles for evaluating diagrams in order to design diagrammatic and heterogeneous logics. I also work on automated diagram layout, which links in with my work on automating diagrammatic reasoning.
Nik Swoboda (2006 - 2012)
I am currently a "Profesor Contratado Doctor" at the Universidad Polite'cnica de Madrid. My main research interest is in diagrammatic reasoning and the nature of non-sentential representation systems. My most recent work includes the development and implementation of heterogeneous reasoning systems for use in the teaching of logic. I also collaborate in cognitive science research studying the use of graphical representations in communication.
Previous Steering Committee Members
Michael Anderson, Alan Blackwell, Peter Cheng, George Furnas, Volker Haarslev, Mary Hegarty, Roland Hubscher, Kim Marriott, Bernd Meyer, and Atsushi Shimojima.