About Me

I'm a PhD student supervised by Prof. Ravin Balakrishnan in Dynamic Graphic Project (DGP) lab at Department of Computer Science, Unviersity of Toronto. My research interest is Information Visualization and Human Computer Interaction. Before coming to UofT, I received my Bachelor's Degree (with honour) in Engineering at College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University in June, 2009 (I was also affiliated with the Chu Kochen Honors College).

Learning painting persistently in my childhood gave me the invaluable magic of discovering and creating beauties of the nature. What is more, four years of undergraduate education in Computer Science not only granted me the solid fundament of knowledge and skills but also made me desire to have the same magic on computers. And I found the perfect blend was in Visualization and HCI.

Currently I'm working on designing novel interactive visualization tools supporting Visual Exploration and Visual Analytics of time-series data, developing multi-touch interaction techniques for navigation, and quantitatively modeling user performance on touch-enabled devices. My CV can be downloaded here.

Publications

Jian Zhao, Steven Drucker, Danyel Fisher, Donald Brinkman.
"TimeSlice: Interactive Faceted Browsing of Timeline Data".
In AVI'12: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, May 2012.
[PDF]

Jian Zhao, Fanny Chevalier, Emmanuel Pietriga, Ravin Balakrishnan.
"Exploratory Analysis of Time-Series with ChronoLenses".
In IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 17(12), pp. 2422-2431, Dec 2011.
[PDF] [Video] [BIBTEX] [DL Link]

* Chronolenses has been referenced as being one of the most interesting papers at InfoVis 2011.

William Soukoreff, Jian Zhao, Xiangshi Ren.
"The Entropy of a Rapid Aimed Movement: Fitts?Index of Difficulty versus Shannon’s Entropy".
In INTERACT'11: 13th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Part 4, LNCS 6949, pp. 222-239, Sep 2011.
[PDF] [BIBTEX] [DL Link]

Jian Zhao, Fanny Chevalier, Ravin Balakrishnan.
"KronoMiner: Using Multi-Foci Navigation for the Visual Exploration of Time-Series Data".
In CHI'11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1737-1746, May 2011.
[PDF] [Video] [BIBTEX] [DL Link]

Selected Undergraduate Projects

Facebook User Profile Visualization

Supervised by Prof. Christopher G. Healey
@Knowledge Discovery Lab, North Carolina State University
Jul. 2008 - Aug. 2008

Non-photorealistic Rendering in Generating Cartoon-like Images

Supervised by Prof. Yizhou Yu
@Zhejiang U & Microsoft Joint Lab, Zhejiang University
Oct.2007 - Mar. 2008

Employment

Research Intern, Microsoft Research Redmond, Jun. 2011 - Sep. 2011

Major Awards

Wolfond Scholarship, University of Toronto, 2010, 2011
University of Toronto Art & Science Fellowship, 2009 - 2014
Chinese National Scholarship, 2006, 2008
1st Class Zhejiang University Academic Scholarship, 2006 - 2008

Teaching Assistant

CSC108 Introduction to Computer Programming Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Fall 2011
CSC148 Introduction to Computer Science Fall 2010
CSC318 Design of Interactive Computational Media Spring 2011, Spring 2012

Community Involvement

Student Volunteers
IEEE VisWeek2011, Providence, 2011.
IEEE VisWeek2010, Salt Lake City, 2010.

Reviewers
CHI WIP 2011, CHI WIP 2012, CHI 2012, APCHI 2012, InfoVis 2012.