Jim Thomas, a visionary scientist and charismatic leader, who led and collaborated with researchers from around the world to advance our understanding of modern information science, died on August 6, 2010 in Richland, WA. He is survived by his wife, his two daughters and sons-in-law, and his four grandchildren.
Jim recruited me out of graduate school in 1997. Since then, we worked together at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), in the same building, on numerous projects and challenges, and, on many occasions, side-by-side until his sudden departure. Jim was as good a mentor and friend to me as I could have asked for. This is my humble tribute to my colleague and friend, who dared to dream and aspired to make a difference throughout his life.
Instead of highlighting Jim’s life-long distinctive accomplishments bullet by bullet, I would like to share with you a story about a winner and his continuous pursuit of success—his four roads less traveled.
Jim took the first less-traveled road soon after he left graduate school in 1971. More than a decade before Foley and van Dam wrote the classic Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, Jim joined General Motors Research Laboratories (now called GM R&D) as a computer scientist and entered the bold and then new world of computer graphics. Within the next decade, Jim rose to the top of the computer graphics community, serving as papers chair and conference chair of the largest and most well-respected conference for computer graphics—the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference. Before long, he chaired ACM SIGGRAPH and led the worldwide community of computer graphics in 1989.
While the trail to computer graphics that Jim blazed gradually became a road traveled by many, he made a career turn to a second road less traveled. With the support of ACM SIGGRAPH, he seized the opportunity of computer graphics as a means of revolutionizing user interfaces in modern computing and organized the first of a series of international workshops on Graphical Input Interaction Techniques (GIIT) at PNNL (then Pacific Northwest Laboratory) in 1980. The GIIT workshop series was later evolved into the greatly successful ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) and led to the expansion of ACM SIGCHI.
The young Thomas continued to explore new frontiers in information science. However, the next less-traveled road was lonelier than ever. In the early 1990s when the area of data visualization was first established, Jim led a team of PNNL scientists and developed the pioneering document visualization technology, known as SPIRE. The work was initially presented at the first IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis) in 1995. I was a student volunteer guarding the door during the presentation. Although the rapt audience in the ballroom was silent, the talk during the following coffee break was all about the SPIRE presentation. It was at that moment that I decided to focus my student research on information visualization. Jim later became Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (1999-2002), chaired the IEEE Visualization (Vis) 2003 conference, and served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) and Palgrave’s Information Visualization (IVS) journal.
Jim had long seen the tremendous potential of information visualization as an information analytical tool, but others were pursuing different ideas. When he began his career’s fourth less-traveled road in 2004, he was determined to bring the science of visual analytics to the world. Over the next five years, Jim founded the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) at PNNL; influenced visual analytics centers established throughout the world, including Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom; helped universities integrate visual analytics into their core information sciences curricula; and was continually invited to speak and advise on the current state and future of visual analytics. For his contributions in creating the next science of visual analytics and its national impact, Jim was presented the prestigious Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Award in the U.S. Capitol in 2009.
Only history can judge the merits of Jim’s contribution to the advancement of modern information science. I do, however, know for sure that Jim’s life-long run of success has set a path for many to follow. Education for future generations was deeply ingrained in Jim Thomas. I hope this story inspires at least a few researchers and scientists (both young and old) to dare to take the road less traveled and make the journey count.
Finally, I would like to dedicate the following poem to the memory of Jim Thomas. It is a revision of a poem I originally wrote to celebrate Jim’s retirement from PNNL last year. I could not know how soon his colleagues, friends, and family would gather again to say goodbye.
Journey of a thousand miles began with a single step —joining Pacific Northwest Lab
Intelligent and charismatic, he soon led the pack and rocked the science and technology world
Master of computer graphics, he whipped up turbulence in a teapot and stunned the community
Traveled through Themescape and crisscrossed Galaxy, he amazed the world with an IN-SPIREd tool
He detected the expected, discovered the unexpected, and illuminated the path of visual analytics
O’er the land of the free, he was one patriotic computer scientist who dreamed big and dared to fail
Much recognized and appreciated by the science community, he was elected an AAAS Fellow
An avid outdoorsman and a beloved family man, he perfected the balance of work and life
So long, Jim Thomas. Rest in peace.
Read and post remembrances of Jim at Jim-Thomas-in-Memoriam, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jim-Thomas-in-Memoriam/138419519526483.
Pak Chung Wong, Richland, WA, August 10, 2010.
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