Mary has received a PhD in Cognitive Psychology by the Indiana University. Since 1988 she has worked in the cognitive aspects of the human computer interaction in companies like Bell Communications Research, Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Corporation and  Compaq Computer. 

Currently she develops her investigations at Microsoft Research within the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group on spatial cognition, the study and design of multimodal interfaces and the intelligent design of notifications.

The achievements obtained by Mary Czerwinski and her global vision have put her in a privileged position in the field of information visualisation in its cognitive psychology side. A field that Information Visualisation has used insufficiently and that has strong implications for the future of the speciality. In order to know better her trajectory it's worth taking a look at her personal page and curriculum vitae

Peter Pirolli is a Principal Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He received his B.Sc. in Psychology and Anthropology from Trent University, Canada and earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University.

From 1985 to 1994 he was a professor at the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Cognitive Science Institute. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Education and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His collaboration with PARC began in 1991 when he became involved in studies of human-information interaction and the development of new user interface technologies

With Stuart Card he co-founded the 'Theory of Information Foraging'.

Nigel Holmes is a graphic designer who specializes in illustrations and animations that clarify processes, numbers and news stories. He is the principal of Explanation Graphics, located just outside of New York City.

Nigel Holmes was the graphics director of Time magazine for 16 years. He has done graphic explanations for the BBC, the Ford Motor Company, American Express, and a number of other companies. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Esquire, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.

He has written five books about information graphics. The latest, Wordless Diagrams, was published by Bloomsbury in 2005.

He is the leader of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. at the University of Maryland at College Park and professor in the  Computer Science dpt. of the same university.

Author of several books on Human Computer Interaction, he is also co-author of the indispensable Readings in Information Visualization. He is also author of Designing the User Interface.

Since 1987 he organizes an annual satellite television presentation on User Interface Strategies.

His work on Information Visualisation has led to a commercial product called Spotfire.

He has also created Olive, as a result of a course project; a web site where you can find a taxonomy of InfoVis environments. Olive is an interesting resource to visit.

Architect by education, he  has been taking part, from the very beginning of his career, in activities related to architecture, design and its main motivation, making information understandable.

He's author of many books and is the originator of the word "Information Architect" for his profession / passion. Among his numerous publications, the books Information Anxiety and Information Architects are two basic references.

His last book is Understanding USA, freely accessible in the net. Wurman has also participated in the successful Access travel guides. He has received the MIT Kevin Lynch award, among many others.

He is one of the  gurus of  Information Design .

E. R. Tufte is professor at the University of Yale where he teaches  Political Science, Statistics and Computer Science.

He's author of several classic books on InfoVis where the aesthetic beauty of the pages is matched with a carefully crafted design and a great clarity of explanation. This is the result of a perfect matching of text and images that constitute a visual language in which both parts become inseparable.

Among his most interesting titles you find The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations. The first one has been recently translated into Spanish along with several other European languages. The translations have been already published.

Tufte has a web site devoted to the diffusion (and sale) of his work through Graphics Press, his own editorial.

Edward Tufte has received awards like the Phi Beta Kappa in Science, and the 1991 Best Graphic Design Award from International Design, among others. His work on Information Visualisation has been fundamental in this field.

Co-founder and associate director of the  Human Interface Technology Lab. at the Washington Technology Center. Founder and CEO of  Worldesign Inc. More recently he has been a senior consultant with SRI Consulting. He currently provides consultancy on strategic and information design issues to leading Internet and design firms.

He has been working for several community media in the State of  California and he is author of books such as "Municipal Control of Cable Communications" (1977), "An Open approach to Information Policymaking" (1989) and co-author of Access Rights to the Electronic Marketplace" (1981). He is also editor of the interesting book Information Design.

Donald Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Northwestern University, and Prof. Emeritus of both Cognitive Science and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego .

He has been Vice President of Apple Computer and an executive at Hewlett Packard. He was President of the Learning Systems division of UNext, an early, online education company.

He serves on many advisory boards, such as Chicago’s Institute of Design and Encyclopedia Britannica. He is a member of the Industrial Design Society of America and is fellow of many organizations, including ACM, AAAS, and the Cognitive Science Society.

He has received honorary degrees from the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) and the University of Padua (Italy), the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from SIGCHI, the professional organization for Computer-Human Interaction, the 2002 Mental Health award for contributions to Business from Psychology Today, and the 2005 Taylor Award for outstanding contribution to the field of Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Norman is the author of fourteen books, available in sixteen languages. Among them you can find “The Design of Everyday Things”, “Things That Make Us Smart” and “The Invisible Computer.” One of his most interesting books, “Emotional Design” emphasizes that products must please and delight, not just perform.

Tamara Munzner received her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in June 2000 for her work on interactive visualization of large graphs and networks. 

Her best known work until the moment has been on 3D hyperbolic geometry (the H3 system for visualising large 3D directed graphs is distributed as SiteManager by Silicon Graphics for the visualisation and management of web sites). She can be considered one of the worldwide experts on this type of visualisation.

She has worked for The Geometry Center, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft Research and Compaq at the Compaq Computer Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. Currently she is performing research on Information Visualisation, Grap`h Drawingand Computer Graphics at the Imager Laboratory of University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada)

Stuart Card is a Xerox Research Fellow and the manager of the User Interface Research group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. With Allen Newell and Tom Moran from CMU, he founded a project to develop models of human performance usable in information system design.

He and his group have developed a number of theories of human-machine interaction, including the Model Human Processor, the GOMS theory of user interaction, and information foraging theory. They have developed new paradigms of human-machine interaction, including the Rooms workspace manager and the Information Visualizer.

The work has resulted in a dozen Xerox products and the founding of Inxight Software, Inc.

Card is a co-author of the book, "The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction", a co-editor of the book, "Human Performance Models for Computer-Aided Engineering", and has served on many editorial boards. He received his A.B. in Physics from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon, where he pursued an interdisciplinary program in psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science.

One of his most popular books, "Readings in Information Visualization", co-written and edited with Jock Mackinlay and Ben Schneiderman, was published in January 1999.

Katy Börner is an Associate Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Adjunct Associate Professor of Informatics, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, and Research Affiliate of the Biocomplexity Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. 

She has been working on numerous projects of Information Visualization, many of them related with the analysis and visualization of user activity data, the mapping of knowledge domains, and the design of cyberinfrastructures.

Among their many works you can find Places and Spaces, a science exhibit created to demonstrate the power of maps for the navigation of physical places and semantic spaces.

Pat Hanrahan is Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University where he teaches computer graphics.

His current research involves visualization, graphics systems and architectures, and image synthesis.

He was a founding employee of Pixar, where he developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the RenderMan(TM) Interface - a protocol that allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs.

Previous to Pixar he directed the 3D computer graphics group in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology.

Professor Hanrahan has received three university teaching awards, two Academy Awards for Science and Technology, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, and the SIGGRAPH Stephen Coons Award. He has been also elected to the National Academy of Engineering

Chaomei Chen is the Editor-in-Chief of Information Visualization, published quarterly by Palgrave Macmilan. He is well known in the information visualization field for his work in visualizing semantic spaces and the use of pathfinder network scaling .

He is the author of Information Visualisation and Virtual Environments (Chen, 1999) . Other known books from Chen are 'Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization' (Chen, 2002) and 'Visualizing the Semantic Web' (Geroimenko and Chen, Eds., 2002).

Based for some years at Brunel University, UK, he has recently moved to Drexel University, USA.

Chen is currently working on information visualization, knowledge domain visualization, intelligent user interfaces, collaborative virtual environments, digital libraries and human-computer interaction .

Colin Ware is Director of the Data Visualization Research Lab, which is part of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire. He is cross appointed between the Departments of Ocean Engineering and Computer Science.

Ware specializes in advanced data visualization and he has a special interest in applications of visualization to Ocean Mapping. He combines interests in both basic and applied research and he has advanced degrees in both computer science (MMath, Waterloo) and in the psychology of perception (PhD,Toronto).

He has published over 90 articles in scientific and technical journals and at leading conferences. Many of these relate to the use of color, texture, motion and 3D displays in information visualization. He is author of the book Information Visualization: Perception for Design

Ware also likes to build useful visualization systems. A founding member of the Ocean Mapping Group at the University of New Brunswick, (and lately the Ocean Mapping Center at UNH) he has been designing 3D interactive visualization systems for ocean mapping for about 13 years. Ware has also contributed to software system visualization. He directed the initial development of the NestedVision3D system for visualizing very large networks of information.

Ware has been instrumental in the creation of two spinoff visualization companies based initially on his research. Interactive Visualization Systems Inc. (ocean mapping applications and NVision Software Systems Inc. (large highly interconnected datasets). He is currently leading a group of GeoZui3D (GEOreferenced Zooming User Interface 3D).

Robert Spence is Professor Emeritus of Information Engineering at Imperial College London. He began his association with Human-Computer Interaction in 1967 with work on the interactive-graphic design of circuits, leading to a commercial CAD tool in 1985 marketed by a company co-founded and chaired by him.

Other research and innovation since then have included many novel techniques for information visualization such as the Attribute Explorer, the Influence Explorer and the Prosection Matrix. Together with Mark Apperley he was responsible for the invention of the Bifocal Display, now often referred to as the Fisheye Lens.

He is currently involved in research into a new method of data display called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) as well as the problem of navigating information spaces

He is the author of the well known book Information Visualization, one of the first books talking specifically about the topic.

Professor Eades has a PhD in Mathematics at the Australian National University (1977) and was appointed a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada in 1977. From 1978-91 he held various positions at the University of Queensland, Australia. He began his current role as Program Leader of NICTA's IMAGEN Program in July 2003.

In 1992 Professor Eades was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the University of Newcastle. He accepted the position of Professor with the School of Information Technologies at The University of Sydney in 2000. He was Head of School of Information Technologies in 2002, and currently holds the Chair of Software Engineering, along with his position with NICTA as Program Leader for the IMAGEN research program. Between 1981-99 he held various visiting positions (mostly sabbaticals), at universities and organisations including Louisiana State University, McGill University, Fujitsu Laboratories, Japan, University of Chile, and University of Limerick, Ireland. Professor Eades maintains his position as Chair of Software Technology with the School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney.

His research interests include information visualisation and algorithms, and he is currently involved with the following projects: Visualisation and Interaction Collaborative Access Table (VICAT); Visualisation and Analysis of Large and Complex Networks (VALACON); Perceptually Effective Multi-Modal Interfaces (PEMMI); and Humans Understanding Logic and Computation (HULC).

Dr. Alan McEachren is Professor of Geography and Director of GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. He is also Chair of International Cartographic Association Commission on Visualization and Virtual Environments. He is author of some books about Geography, the most well known of them being 'How Maps Work, Representation, Visualization and Design', New York: Guilford Press, 1995. Dr. McEachren has also given hundreds of presentations and conferences around the world and made contributions and written articles in specialized publications.

In How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization and Design Dr. McEachren has developed a cognitive-semiotic theoretical perspective from which to address these and related issues. Much of his work deals with dynamic forms of representation. These forms are exploratory spatial data analysis tools and map animation for the understanding of geographic processes.

His work during the 1990s focused on a range of issues associated with geographic representation and geovisualization. Within these domains, his long standing interest has been the interaction between formalized visual and digital representations inherent in maps and geographic information systems and human mental representation of space and space-time.

Applications areas focused on in his geovisualization research have included epidemiological analysis, earth science education, implications of global environmental change, and uncertainty in health and environmental data and in meteorological and climatological model results.

Most recent research foci of Dr. McEachren include integration of geographic visualization with other knowledge construction methods, natural interfaces to GIS, GeoVirtual environments, and geocollaboration (design and use of technologies to enable groups to work productively with geospatial information).

George Robertson collaborates as a Senior Researcher in the Visualization and Interaction group at Microsoft Research. He is an ACM Fellow and manages a project on 3D User Interfaces and Information Visualization.

Before coming to Microsoft, he was a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC, working primarily on 3D interactive animation interfaces for intelligent information access applications. He was the architect of the Information Visualizer. He has also been a Senior Scientist at Thinking Machines, a Senior Scientist at Bolt Beranek and Newman, and a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Throughout his fruitful career, he has made significant contributions to machine learning (genetic Classifier Systems), multimedia message systems (Diamond), hypertext systems (ZOG), operating systems (Accent), and programming languages (L*).

Until 1998, Jakob Nielsen worked for Sun Microsystems as the usability leader for several design and redesign rounds of Sun's website and intranet (SunWeb). His earlier affiliations include Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center.

He is principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). In his website useit.com you can find most of the more valuable (and criticised) information on Web usability available today

Among his numerous publications, the book Designing Web Usability is a basic reference in the field.

He is one of the gurus of Web Usability.

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a research scientist in the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Envisioning Science Project . One of her books, Envisioning Science, The Design and Craft of the Science Image has been published by The MIT Press.

The Image and Meaning (IM) Collaborative workshops are a primary part of her efforts. The purpose of the series of meetings is to help scientists, writers and visual communicators develop and share improved methods of communicating scientific concepts and technical information through images and visual representations.

Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Frankel creates images for journal submissions, presentations and publications for general audiences.

She has received awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design for her previous work photographing the built landscape and architecture. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is coauthor with George M. Whitesides of the book "On the Surface of Things, Images of the Extraordinary in Science" (Chronicle Books, to be reprinted by the Harvard University Press, 2007). Whitesides and Frankel will also be publishing their next book, "No Small Matter" in 2007.

Ken Brodlie is member of staff in the School of Computing at Leeds University. In the School, Brodlie is Chair of the Staff Promotions and Development (SPAD) Committee. For sessions 1999/2000 and 2000/01 he was Director of Learning and Teaching in the School. Up to summer 1999, Brodlie was Director of the School's taught postgraduate programmes.

Ken is also a member of the Scientific Computation and Visualization research group, and the Informatics Research Institute. For the Session 1997/98 he acted as Director of the CFD Centre (Centre for Computational Fluid Dynamics) He is member of the Research Steering Committee in the CoMIR (Centre of Medical Imaging Research)

He took part in early development and still maintain an interest in the project 'Leeds Advanced Driving Simulator', an interdisciplinary project - involving Transport Studies, Psychology and Computer Studies - that has created an advanced driving simulator. Ken Brodlie is member of the NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group) Technical Policy Committee, he was the founding Chairman of the Eurographics UK Chapter, and local organiser for the 1998 EGUK Conference which was held in Leeds. In 1999 he was elected as a Fellow of the Eurographics Association.

Tim Berners-Lee holds the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He manages the World Wide Web Consortium, a forum open to companies and organisations with the aim of leading the Web to its maximum potential.

A graduate of Oxford University, where acquired his background in system design in real-time communication and the development of text processing software. In 1989 while working at the CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, he conceived the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990.

He's the writer of one of the most acclaimed books related with the Web: Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti (Harper San Francisco; ISBN:0062515861).