Professor Ward Wins IEEE Award

The WPI Computer Science Department is very pleased and proud to announce that Professor Matthew O. Ward has been given the IEEE VPG Software System Award for his work in multivariate visualization and visual analytics.

The award specifically honors his open source software called XmdvTool (davis.wpi.edu/xmdv). The first version of this software was presented 20 years ago in a paper titled "Xmdvtool: Integrating multiple methods for visualizing multivariate data", at the 1994 Conference on Visualization. The citation count for this paper has reached a remarkable value of 458, and it is growing daily.

The award comes from the IEEE Visualization Pioneers Group and states:

"This award honors Matthew O. Ward for his pioneering work in the visualization of multivariate data, and specifically for his sustained commitment to creating and supporting the XmdvTool visualization system. XmdvTool has now been publicly available and under continuing development for 20 years. It has been widely used in research and industry settings in visualization and many other disciplines, and is one of the most vibrant success stories of the visualization software landscape."

Matt Ward was honored by WPI faculty, students and alumni as well as professional colleagues at a celebration held on September 30th, 2014 in the Higgins House on the WPI campus. The event celebrated this award, marked the 20th anniversary of the XmdvTool software, and acknowledged his numerous accomplishments in information visualization.

Matt has followed this first XmdvTool publication with a rich string of successful research, tools, innovations, grants and students in this important field of multivariate visualization and visual analytics. His work includes the 2010 publication of the 500 page book of data visualization concepts and theory with the title "Interactive Data Visualization: Foundations, Techniques, and Applications", co-authored with Georges Grinstein and Daniel Keim.