School of IC Honors Decorated Professor with Namesake Award

One word comes up more often than others when describing John Stasko — kindness.

Stasko achieved a great deal during his 36 years as a professor at Georgia Tech and made significant contributions to data visualization research and innovations. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In all those years, none of his students or colleagues could recall a moment when he didn’t demonstrate kindness.

“He supported me in fleshing out my ideas into a Ph.D. dissertation,” said Dean Jerding (CS Ph.D. 1997), one of Stasko’s former students. “He was always calm and communicated any criticism in a very positive way. He never said I had a dumb idea. He was always encouraging, and he redirected you with his input.”

The School of Interactive Computing bid farewell to Stasko on Thursday, following his official retirement in July. 

During the event, Shaowen Bardzell, School of IC chair and professor, announced the establishment of the John Stasko Award for Teaching Excellence in Stasko’s honor. Bardzell said the award will be given each year to as many as “two faculty members in the School of Interactive Computing whose teaching and mentoring channel John’s passion and care for our students.”

“You can be effective while being nice, and you can be heard while being quiet and thoughtful,” said Keith Edwards, a professor in the School of IC who was one of Stasko’s first students. “He’s the same even-keeled, thoughtful person as he was when I first knew him. He’s very generous. If it hadn’t been for John, I think there’s a chance I would’ve fallen through the cracks when I was looking for an advisor at Georgia Tech. I’m very fortunate he took me on.”

New College, New Blood

Stasko came to Georgia Tech in 1989 fresh off completing his Ph.D. in computer science at Brown University. That was a year before the establishment of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The computer science program was administered by the School of Information and Computer Science, which was housed in the College of Sciences.

“It was exciting because we were igniting computer science at Georgia Tech, and there were a lot of young faculty like me who were brand new, right out of college,” Stasko said. “There was this spirit of working together and wanting to make something great here.”

Stasko said when the College of Computing was established in 1990, Georgia Tech ranked outside the top 20 of U.S. News and World Report’s computer science program rankings. 

Many new faculty members like Stasko were interested in data visualization, computer graphics, and human-computer interaction. Georgia Tech quickly bolstered its computer science reputation by positioning itself at the forefront of those emerging fields with the creation of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center.

“A lot of the top five to 10 schools like Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley were very strong in the traditional subareas of computer science,” Stasko said. “I think it helped us to develop a strength in HCI, graphics and visualization. We were one of the earliest to embrace those, so it made it easier for us to shine. U.S. News and World Report had a new sub-ranking called Graphics and HCI, and we were ranked No. 1 very early on. That really helped us.”

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Growing as a Mentor

Stasko credits Jim Foley, the first director of GVU, who now has a scholarship named in his honor for outstanding graduate students, as the model for how to conduct oneself as a teacher.

“Jim was the most wonderful mentor I could’ve had,” Stasko said. “He was a famous professor, and everyone in computer science around the country knew him, but he was always so humble, and he would meet all the new junior faculty and want to help us get going. He allowed us to shine.”

Stasko became most well-known for his research, particularly for his invention of Jigsaw in 2007. Jigsaw is a visualization algorithm that can create a visual index of a large document collection.

“It could help an analyst see the story that’s spread across 1,500 different documents about a police case, for example,” he said. “Or maybe they were reviews of a product that you wanted to learn about, or which car or which TV you should buy without having to read 1,500 reviews. We used early machine learning methods to analyze the text and created a suite of different visualizations communicating that analysis.”

In addition to his research, Stasko taught an intro to JavaScript course for 20 years to thousands of Tech students. Though it wasn’t required of him to teach it, he said he enjoyed interacting with incoming first-year students because it “helped keep me feeling young.”

In 2007, Stasko joined the faculty of the newly created School of Interactive Computing. He served as the interim chair of the school from 2021 to 2022, and he was also named Regents’ Professor by the University System of Georgia in 2021.

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Leaving a Legacy

Today, the College of Computing has the No. 5 undergraduate and No. 6 graduate computer science program in the U.S. and is the largest college on Georgia Tech’s campus.

“I’m not sure any other CS program in the country has had that kind of jump like we have had over the past 35 years,” Stasko said. “The higher you go, the harder it is to jump even one spot.

“I think we knew that (the College) was going to grow and that was part of the plan. I’m not sure I would’ve envisioned we’d ever be 150 to 200 faculty in the college, but we could all see computer science was going to be a crucial part of society going forward.”

Stasko will continue to be a part of the School of IC as Professor Emeritus. His final student, Alexander Bendeck, finishes his Ph.D. in 2026. 

Bendeck will be the 25th student Stasko has advised and graduated over his career. He said he never had the funding to run a large lab, but that allowed him to invest in the students he took under his wing.

“I often found some unconventional Ph.D. students,” Stasko said. “Some of my early students started in very different areas of computer science. I’ve looked for diamonds in the rough. 

“I see some of them now with their families and they make me feel old because they have kids who are in college now. But they’ve done well. I think half of my students have gone into academia, and the other half into industry. I’m very proud in all that they’ve achieved, both personally and professionally.”