William Ribarsky is the Bank of America Endowed Chair in Information Technology
at UNC Charlotte. Before that he
was Principal Research Scientist and Associate Director for
External Relations of the GVU Center . He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cincinnati in 1974.
Dr. Ribarsky's research interests include navigation and dynamical query of information spaces using interactive visualization and hierarchical representations; virtual environments applied to scientific and information visualization; virtual environment design and evaluations of user performance; visual steering of simulations; methods for real-time organization and display of spatial data; and general issues in time-critical visual analysis. Previously he did research in computational physics including molecular dynamics studies of surfaces and liquid-solid interfaces. He has a long record of research support from government and industry with grants or contracts from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Lab, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Digital Equipment Corporation, Schlumberger, IBM, Intel, the Department of Energy, the Naval Research Lab, DARPA, and other agencies.
A major emphasis of Ribarsky's work is the development of collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts. Thus he has worked with physicists, atmospheric scientists, computer scientists, psychologists, geographic information system specialists, and experts in literature and culture. This work falls under the rubric of the Data Visualization Group , which has the charge of exploring general data and information visualization methods for a broad range of applications. Among current projects of the group is VGIS, a system for real-time, 3D navigation of high resolution terrain, image, and feature databases of any size. This research also involves studying how to represent changing organizational hierarchies that may be composed of thousands of moving units or large collections of urban buildings. Other projects involve computational steering of large scale, dynamic simulations (via direct manipulation of visual representations) and data models and analysis techniques for 3D multivariate data. Finally the group has begun a project to develop real-time, exploratory visual data mining. Related to this work is the creation of a hierarchical visualization structure as a framework for knowledge gathering, uncluttered visualization based on perceptual models, and detail management.
Ribarsky's group also works extensively in virtual reality. They are investigating 3D interaction techniques and stereoscopic display on the Virtual Workbench and other virtual environments. They have developed VR applications such as a global terrain navigation system (on the Virtual Workbench), a Virtual Annotation System, and a Virtual Data Visualizer. They have also studied the key issue of user performance in realistic virtual environments with dynamically varying frame rates.
Dr. Ribarsky is prominent in the national and international visualization communities. For 1995 and 1996 he was general chair of the IEEE Visualization Conference , the leading international conference in scientific and information visualization. He is Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics , is co-Chair of the Eurographics-IEEE Symposium on Visualization (VisSym '99, the first joint EG-IEEE visualization conference in Europe), and is on the Steering Committee for the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference Series . Dr. Ribarsky is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the American Physical Society, and participates in technical review for several journals and conferences.
In his spare time, Ribarsky indulges in a passion for obscure Hungarian and Balkan dance and music . His wife is similarly afflicted, although his children are not yet infected.