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.

I still remember when I first met Dirk at Siggraph 1996 in New Orleans, introduced by my then-PhD advisor Roni Yagel. We ‘clicked’ from the start, but who would not ‘click’ with him. He was such a good-spirited guy – one could pretty much talk with him about everything. He had a great sense of humor and yet was so full of research ideas, so creative, and so productive. Back in New Orleans, we ended up ‘tasting’ some of the French Quarter establishments, along with Roni. It was an interesting evening, and we actually managed to talk (although only briefly) about medical visualization during a live performance.

Little did I know back then that he would be the person co-authoring the book I would be using as a text in my graduate visualization course 10 years later – none of these parts did I know or even suspect back then. He grew into an exquisite driver for medical visualization research. He will live forever through this textbook, and also the many milestone papers he co-authored, the numerous tutorials he taught at the Visualization conference and elsewhere, the many PhD students he has minted, and the conferences he chaired or helped bring to life. Very notable in this respect are the Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) which he co-founded, and the Conference for Robot-Assisted Surgery (CURAC) 2008 and EG Parallel Graphics (2002, 2004) where he served as a program chair.

Dirk was also the long-time publicity chair of the visualization conference and related activities, since 2000, which entailed the careful managing of email lists and striking the delicate balance between information dissemination and spam. When I was chair of Visweek in 2009, he impressed me by never missing an important date when to send community email, always diligently updating the information or asking for updates. He was so very much overqualified for this job, being a professor for computer-assisted surgery at the University of Leipzig and leading an active research group on visual computing, but he did this important service for the community every year and throughout the year without much ado.

I am still shattered from the fateful event last Monday morning when I received the brief email from a mutual friend in Leipzig stating that Dirk had died running a half-marathon with the finish line in sight on the Sunday before, March 28, 2010. Completely perplexed, I was en route in my car at the time and for the next hour all I could do was drive, with memories of our many shared experiences passing me by like the trees lining Long Island’s Northern State Parkway. When arriving at my office I could just sit for a while and then send an email to the one community email list I knew, VisWeek 2010.

I thought about what we as a community could do to console Dirk’s family – his wife Heidi and his two young sons, Robert and Erik. He was such a dedicated husband and father – whenever he was on travel he skyped with them every day, and just for that he will serve as an example for us all. Of course, there is nothing in the world that can console a loss like this, but it may be of help to his family to know that many are mourning along with them. The Facebook page Dirk-Bartz-In-Memoriam, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dirk-Bartz-In-Memoriam/107084542655761 created for this purpose now has over 100 subscribers from countries all over the world. It is a vivid testimony for how many lives Dirk has touched and how fondly he will be remembered.

While starting this Facebook site and sending these initial emails, I could not help myself thinking that all I was basing these efforts on was a single 3-line email, although from a friend I absolutely trust. Deep inside, on that Tuesday, I hoped and was almost sure of it, that sooner or later I would receive an email or phone call from Dirk where he would say: “What are you doing? I’m not dead … but nice try!” Then he would crack a smile and after spending some time talking about the origins of this ‘incidence’ he would go on with a conversation about other things, possibly research. This is exactly how he was and how he will always be remembered: easy-going, fun, forgiving, and blessed with a keen percept for the good, important, and interesting things in life.

Dirk, you will be sorely missed and the world is much poorer without you. Our hearts go out to your young family!

Klaus Mueller, April 6, 2010