Jock Mackinlay: "The Combinatorics of Graphical Presentation"
The effort required to develop smart graphics systems can be motivated by
addressing combinatorical problems, which might have a size or complexity
that challenges designers to anticipate every data, task, and technological
scenario. Using my thesis work on the automatic design of graphical
presentation of relational information and my more recent work on
information visualization, I review the process of graphical presentation
to identify various combinatorical problems that might justify a smart
graphic approach. Some of these problems appear to be ready for attack,
others appear to be quite challenging.