Jessie Kennedy
Jessie Kennedy

Prof Jessie Kennedy

Enhanced Associate

  J.Kennedy@napier.ac.uk

   

Biography

Professor Jessie Kennedy is Emeritus Professor in Computing.


Appointed in January 2015, Jessie's first degree was in Biology, followed by an MPhil in Computing, which led to a research assistant post in medical computing at the University of Edinburgh in 1983.

She joined Edinburgh Napier University in 1986 as a lecturer, was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1992, Reader in 1995, and Professor in 2000. Thereafter she held the post of Director of the Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation from 2010-14 and was Dean of Research & Innovation from 2015 - 2019. She was awarded Emeritus Professor in October 2019.

Jessie has published widely, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications and over £2 million in research funding from a range of bodies, including EPSRC, BBSRC, National Science Foundation, and KTP, and has had 16 PhD students complete.

She has been programme chair, programme committee member and organiser of many international conferences, a reviewer and panel member for many national and international computer science funding bodies, and became a Member of EPSRC Peer Review College in 1996 and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Jessie has a long-standing record of contribution to inter-disciplinary research, working to further biological research through the application of novel computing technology.

Her research in the areas of user interfaces to databases and data visualisation in biology contributed to the establishment of the field of biological visualisation, where she is a recognised international leader.

Jessie hosted the first biological visualisation workshop at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was an invited speaker at a BBSRC workshop on Challenges in Biological Visualisation, was a founding member of the International Symposium in Biological Visualisation - being Programme Chair in 2011, General Chair in 2012 and 2013 - and steering committee member since 2014.-2019. She is currently on the Steering Committee of EuroVis.

She has been keynote speaker at related international conferences and workshops, such as VIZBI, the International Visualisation conference and BioIT World, and is currently leading a BBSRC network on biological visualisation.

Her research in collaboration with taxonomists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, produced a data model for representing differing taxonomic opinions in Linnaean classification.

This work led to collaboration on a large USA-funded project with ecologists from six US universities and resulted in a data standard for the exchange biodiversity data that has been adopted by major global taxonomic and biodiversity organisations.

Research Groups

Themes

Research Areas

Events

Esteem

Advisory panels and expert committees or witness

  • EU Project Reviewer, pro-iBiosphere, 28/10/2014, Brussels
  • EU Project Review, BioVel, 7/11/2013, Brussels
  • EU Project Reviewer, VIBRANT, 30/1/2012, Brussels
  • EU Project Reviewer, i4Life, 15/12/2011, Brussels
  • Member of the project review panel for the EU project VIBRANT
  • Member of Advisory Board of the VITAE Scotland Northern Ireland Hub
  • Member Scottish Funding Council KTG Review Working Group 2015
  • Edinburgh Napier University representative on the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Research Pool (SICSA) Research Committee, 2011- 2015
  • Member of the project review panel for the EU project pro-ioBiosphere
  • Member of the project review panel for the EU project i4Life
  • VITAE Scottish Hub Advisory Committee member, 2008-11
  • Advisory panel member for the BBSRC funded BioLayout Express 3D visualisation project at the Roslin Institute
  • EU Project Reviewer, BioVel, 6th November 2012, Brussels
  • EU Project Reviewer, VIBRANT, 28/1/2014, Brussels
  • Chair TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) Taxonomic Names and Concepts Group, 2004-09
  • EU Project Reviewer, BioVel, 19/02/2015, Brussels
  • EU Project Reviewer, pro-iBiosphere, 27/10/2014, Brussels
  • Scottish Representative at EU Smart Specialism Planning meeting, Linkoping, Sweden, April 2014

 

Conference Organising Activity

  • Member of Program Committee, InfoVis 2019, Vancouver, Oct 2019
  • Steering Committee Member EuroVis
  • Member of Program Committee, EuroVis, Brno, Czech Republic, June 2018
  • Member of Program Committee, InfoVis 2017, Phoenix Arizona Sept. 2017
  • Member of Program Committee, IVAPP 2017, Porto March 2017
  • Member of Program Committee, EuroVis, Barcelona, June 2017
  • Organiser, BBSRC Biological Visualisation Network Annual Meeting, Edinburgh April 2017
  • Member of Programme Committee – CGVF, Bournemouth, Sept 2016
  • Member of Program Committee, EuroVis, Gronigen, June 2016
  • Steering Committee Member, BioVis 2014, Boston, USA, July 2014
  • Chair of Workshop: Applications of Information Visualisation in Bioinformatics, September 15th 2008, Royal Society of Edinburgh
  • Member of Program Committee, EuroVA, Cagliari, June 2015
  • Member of the Programme Committee for InfoVis 2010, Salt Lake City
  • Member of the Programme Committee, Eurovis 2010, 9-11 June, Bordeaux,France
  • Member of the Short papers programme committee for Eurovis 2013
  • Program Co-Chair – Short Papers, EuroVis, Cagliari, June 2015
  • Member of Program Committee IV 2014, Paris, July 2014
  • Member of the Programme Committee Data Integration in the Life Sciences, 2010, Goteburg
  • Co-organiser of Dagstuhl Seminar on BioVis, 9-14/9/2012.
  • Participant at Dagstuhl Seminar On Information Visualization
  • Member of the EuroVis 2012 Programme Committee
  • Member of the Programme Committee British National Conference on Databases 2010, Dundee
  • Member of the programme committee for the 28th BNCOD 2011
  • Member of the programme committee for the 23rd Scientific and Statistical Database Management Conference
  • Member of the Programme Committee for IV 2010, London
  • Programme Co-Chair for BioVis 2011: Symposium on Biological Data Visualization
  • Member of the programme committee for IV 2013 in London.
  • Member of Program Committee, InfoVis 2009, Atlantic City, USA, October 2009.
  • Member of Program Committee, EuroVis, Eindhoven, 2008.
  • Member of Program Committee PacificVis 2015, Hangzhou, China
  • Member of Program Committee, IVAPP, Berlin, March, January 2015
  • Member of Program Committee, BioVis 2016, Baltimore, October 2016
  • Member of Program Committee IV 2009, London, July 2009.
  • Member of Program Committee PacificVis 2014, Yokohama, Japan, March 2014
  • Member of Program Committee 25th British National Conference on Databases, Cardiff, July 2008.
  • Member of Program Committee for the International Conference on Information Visualisation Theory and Applications, France 2010
  • Member of Program Committee, IVAPP, Lisbon, Portugal, January 2014
  • Member of Program Committee, InfoVis 2014, Paris, France, November 2014
  • Member of the programme committee for EuroVis 2011.
  • Member of the programme committee for InfoVis 2013
  • Member of Program Committee, InfoVis 2008, Ohio, USA, October 2008.
  • Member of Program Committee, EuroVis, Berlin, 2009.
  • Program Co-Chair – Short Papers, EuroVis, Swansea, June 2014
  • General Co-Chair for BioVis, the 3rd International Symposium in Biological Visualization
  • Member of Program Committee PacificVis 2013, Sydney, February 2013
  • Member of Program Committee, BioVis 2014, Boston, USA, July 2014
  • Member of the Programme Committee for InfoVis 2012
  • Member of Program Committee 26th British National Conference on Databases, Cardiff, July 2009.
  • Member of Program Committee, VAST 2016, Baltimore, October 2016
  • Participant at Dagstuhl Seminar On Information Visualisation At Schloss Dagstuhl.
  • Organiser of the 1st Annual Meeting of the BBSRC Biological Visualisation Network
  • General Co-Chair of BioVis 2012
  • Programme Chair of the British National Conference on Databases, 2007
  • Member of Program Committee IV 2008, London, July 2008.
  • Program Chair 24th British National Conference on Databases, Glasgow, July 2007.
  • Member of Program Committee, BioVis 2015, Dublin, July 2015

 

Editorial Activity

  • 1. Associate Editor, Plant Methods
  • Editor of Special Issue of BMC Bioinformatics Journal on Biological Visualisation

 

External Examining/Validations

  • External Reviewer, Tenure Review, Dr Alex Lex, School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA, July 2019
  • External Reviewer, Habilitation Degree - Dr M Streit, Johannes Kepler University Linz , Austria, April 2016
  • External Reviewer, Vienna Research Group for Young Investigators/Associate Professorship, Dr Ivan Viola, Vienna University of Technology, December 2016
  • External Examiner Under Graduate and MSc in Computer Science, Multimedia & Telecommunications, University of Salford, 2006-09
  • External Examiner, School of Computing, Postgraduate Programmes, University of Abertay, 2000-03
  • External Examiner MSc Compting, University of Glasgow, 2001-04
  • External examiner, University of Abertay, School of Computing Research Review, 8th November 2010
  • External Examiner, MSc Information Systems, Wolverhampton Univ. 1994-98

 

Fellowships and Awards

  • Honourable Mention: EuroVis 2017: ‘Kerracher, N., & Kennedy, J. (2017). Constructing and Evaluating Visualisation Task Classifications: Process and Considerations
  • Honourable Mention: EuroVis 2017: Constructing and Evaluating Visualisation Task Classifications: Process and Considerations, Natalie Kerracher and Jessie B. Kennedy
  • Best Panel IEEE VIS 2016: Pathways for Theoretical Advances in Visualization, Georges Grinstein, Chris Johnson, Jessie Kennedy, Tamara Munzner, Melanie Tory
  • Winner of the Edinburgh Ambassadors ScotSpirit Award 2016 sponsored by VisitScotland
  • Best short paper EuroVis 2014: Visual techniques to support exploratory analysis of temporal graph data Kerracher, N., Kennedy, J., Chalmers, K., & Graham, M.
  • Best paper award BioVis 2014: Helium: visualization of large scale plant pedigrees, Shaw, P., Graham, M., Kennedy, J., Milne, I., & Marshall, D. F.
  • Governor’s Prize
  • Best paper award at BioVis 2014
  • Winner of the Edinburgh Ambassador #ScotSpirit Award 2016 sponsored by VisitScotland
  • Re-elected to the EPSRC Peer Review College.
  • IEEE VIS 2016 Best Panel: Pathways for Theoretical Advances in Visualization
  • Best short paper at EuroVis 2014

 

Grant Funding Panel Member

  • BBSRC BBR Funding Panel Member, 23/1/2018, Birmingham
  • BBSRC BBR Funding Panel Meeting, 4/2/2016, Bristol
  • EPSRC Programme Grant Funding panel member, 11/2/2015, Swindon
  • BBSRC BBR Funding Panel meeting, 10/2/2014, Birmingham
  • BBSRC BBR Funding Panel meeting, 17/10/2014, Manchester
  • Member of the BBSRC BBR funding panel.
  • Member of EPSRC Responsive Mode Panel meeting 23/10/2013, Swindon
  • Member of BBSRC Funding Panel meeting, 11/7/2013, Birmingham
  • Member of EPSRC Funding Panel meeting, 17/9/2013, Swindon
  • Member of EPSRC Funding Panel meeting 6th June 2102, Swindon
  • Member of BBSRC Funding Panel meeting 20th March 2012, Swindon
  • Member of BBSRC TRDF Funding Panel meeting 4/12/2012, Swindon
  • Member of EPSRC Funding Panel meeting 4-5th October 2011, Swindon
  • Member of the BBSRC Funding Panel meeting 5th September 2011, Swindon
  • Member of the Challenging Engineering 2010 ICT short listing Panel 2010-11.
  • Member of the Science Foundation Ireland Computer Science funding panel 2010-11
  • Member of 2009-10 Swedish Computer Science Research Funding Panel
  • Member of the Science Foundation Ireland Computer Science Funding Panel, 2009
  • Member of EPSRC Funding Panel meeting 12/03/2008
  • Member of EPSRC Bioinformatics Funding panel, 2-3 Oct 2007
  • Member of EPSRC funding panel, 8/11/2005, Swindon
  • Member of EPSRC eScience Funding panel, 22/7/2003, London
  • Member of EPSRC funding panel member 10/7/2001, Swindon
  • Member of EPSRC/BBSRC Bioinformatics Funding Panel member, 1998-01

 

Grant Reviewer

  • Carnegie Trust Grant Assessor
  • Grant Reviewer Austrian Science Foundation
  • Grant Reviewer Austrian Science Foundation 2013
  • EPSRC Peer Review College.
  • BBSRC Reviewer

 

Invited Speaker

  • Invited Talk, 'Biological Visualisation', Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Jan 2019
  • Distinguished Researcher Speaker, Taxonomy and Visualisation, Distinguished Lecture Series, Scientific Computing Institute, University of Utah, USA, 29/9/2017
  • Invited Speaker, Visualising Taxonomy, Opening Conference Centre for Medical Imaging and Visualization, Bikuben Conference Center, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen Norway, 12/12/2017
  • Invited Talk, Biological Visualisation, Dept. Computer Science, St Andrews University, 7/11/2017
  • Keynote Speaker, Information Design Principles and Biological Visualisation, Research Data Visualisation Workshop, Software Sustainability Institute, University of Manchester, 28/7/2016
  • Invited Keynote speaker at CDVE2010
  • Keynote speaker at IV 2012
  • Invited panel speaker, Motivating Researchers for Knowledge Exchange, AURIL/ARMA/PraxisUnico Joint Directors Forum, April 2016
  • Invited speaker. “User Centred Design in BioVis: a Case study”. Symposium on Understanding Cancer Genomics through Information Visualization, Tokyo, Japan, 22nd Feb 2013
  • Invited Speaker at The Making Sense Of Large Datasets: Perspectives Across The Sciences Conference.
  • Opening Keynote Speaker at Data Visualization & Exploration Tools, Part of Bio-IT World & Expo, April 21-23, 2015, Seaport World Trade Center, Boston, USA
  • Keynote speaker at VIZBI 2012
  • Invited talk at the EU 4D4Life Workshop at Reading University.
  • Invited Tutorial on the Principles of Information Visualization at VIZBI 2012 in Heidelberg
  • Invited Plenary Speaker At BBSRC Challenges In Biological Visualization Workshop, November 2010
  • Invited speaker, “BiVi: The Biological Visualisation Network”, BioJS Conference, 3rd July 2015, The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich

 

Membership of Professional Body

  • Fellow of the British Computer Society

 

Research Degree External Examining

  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Bangor University
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Manchester University
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Linnaeus University, Vaxjo, Sweden
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Swansea University
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, University of the West of Scotland 2013
  • External Examiner, PhD Computer Science, University of Lancaster, July, 1998
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Heriot-Watt Univ 2013
  • External Examiner, PhD Bioinformatics, University of Edinburgh 2016
  • External Examiner, PhD Bioinformatics, Univ. of Glasgow 2007
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Univ. of Loughborough 2013
  • External Examiner, PhD Computer Science, University of Kent, September 2006
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Swansea University 2011
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Univ. of Glasgow 2008
  • External Examiner, DPhil Computer Science, University of Ulster, May, 1997
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Linnaeus Univ, Växjö, Sweden 2013
  • External Examiner, MPhil Computing, Lancaster University 2011
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Abertay University 2010
  • External Examiner, MSc Computer Science, University of Aberdeen, July, 1997
  • External Examiner, MSc in Computer Science, UMIST - Jan 1996
  • External Examiner, MSc in Computer Science, University of Birmingham, April 1993
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2015
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Univ. of Leiden 2012
  • External Reviewer, Habilitation Degree, Johannes Kepler University Linz , Austria, April 2016
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, KU Leuven, Belgium 2016
  • External Examiner, PhD in Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University - Jan 1996
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, St Andrews University 2012
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing & Information Management, London Southbank University 2005
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing, Open University 2009
  • External Examiner, PhD Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Dec. 2004

 

Reviewing

  • Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

 

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Date


129 results

Design Considerations of Voice Articulated Generative AI Virtual Reality Dance Environments

Conference Proceeding
Casas, L., Mitchell, K., Tamariz, M., Hannah, S., Sinclair, D., Koniaris, B., & Kennedy, J. (in press)
Design Considerations of Voice Articulated Generative AI Virtual Reality Dance Environments.
We consider practical and social considerations of collaborating verbally with colleagues and friends, not confined by physical distance, but through seamless networked telepr...

Developing Visualisations to Enhance an Insider Threat Product: A Case Study

Conference Proceeding
Graham, M., Kukla, R., Mandrychenko, O., Hart, D., & Kennedy, J. (2021)
Developing Visualisations to Enhance an Insider Threat Product: A Case Study. In 2021 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) (47-57). https://doi.org/10.1109/VizSec53666.2021.00011
This paper describes the process of developing data visualisations to enhance a commercial software platform for combating insider threat, whose existing UI, while perfectly f...

Design and Evaluation of Visualisation Techniques to Facilitate Argument Exploration

Journal Article
Khartabil, D., Collins, C., Wells, S., Bach, B., & Kennedy, J. (2021)
Design and Evaluation of Visualisation Techniques to Facilitate Argument Exploration. Computer Graphics Forum, 40(6), 447-465. https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14389
This paper reports the design and comparison of three visualizations to represent the structure and content within arguments. Arguments are artefacts of reasoning widely used ...

Embodied online dance learning objectives of CAROUSEL +

Conference Proceeding
Mitchell, K., Koniaris, B., Tamariz, M., Kennedy, J., Cheema, N., Mekler, E., …Mac Williams, C. (2021)
Embodied online dance learning objectives of CAROUSEL +. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) (309-313). https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00062
This is a position paper concerning the embodied dance learning objectives of the CAROUSEL + 1 project, which aims to impact how online immersive technologies influence multiu...

Visual Encodings for Networks with Multiple Edge Types

Conference Proceeding
Vogogias, T., Archambault, D. W., Bach, B., & Kennedy, J. (2020)
Visual Encodings for Networks with Multiple Edge Types. In AVI '20: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces. https://doi.org/10.1145/3399715.3399827
This paper reports on a formal user study on visual encodings of networks with multiple edge types in adjacency matrices. Our tasks and conditions were inspired by real proble...

Constructing and Evaluating Visualisation Task Classifications: Process and Considerations

Journal Article
Kerracher, N., & Kennedy, J. (2019)
Constructing and Evaluating Visualisation Task Classifications: Process and Considerations. Computer Graphics Forum, 36(3), 47-59. https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.13167
Categorising tasks is a common pursuit in the visualisation research community, with a wide variety of taxonomies, typologies, design spaces, and frameworks having been develo...

BayesPiles: Visualisation Support for Bayesian Network Structure Learning

Journal Article
Vogogias, A., Kennedy, J., Archambault, D., Bach, B., Smith, V. A., & Currant, H. (2018)
BayesPiles: Visualisation Support for Bayesian Network Structure Learning. ACM transactions on intelligent systems and technology, 10(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3230623
We address the problem of exploring, combining and comparing large collections of scored, directed networks for understanding inferred Bayesian networks used in biology. In th...

Using a task classification in the visualisation design process for task understanding and abstraction: an empirical study

Conference Proceeding
Kerracher, N., Kennedy, J., & Chalmers, K. (2018)
Using a task classification in the visualisation design process for task understanding and abstraction: an empirical study. In J. Johansson, F. Sadlo, & T. Schreck (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2018 Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis 2018) - Short Papers, (79-83). https://doi.org/10.2312/eurovisshort.20181082
Task classifications are widely purported to be useful in the design process, with various suggestions having been made for their use at the different stages. However, little ...

Pathways for Theoretical Advances in Visualization

Journal Article
Chen, M., Grinstein, G., Johnson, C. R., Kennedy, J., & Tory, M. (2017)
Pathways for Theoretical Advances in Visualization. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 37(4), 103-112. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2017.3271463
There is little doubt that having a theoretic foundation will benefit the field of visualization, including its main subfields: information visualization, scientific visualiza...

MLCut: exploring multi-level cuts in dendrograms for biological data

Conference Proceeding
Vogogias, A., Kennedy, J., Archambault, D., Anne Smith, V., & Currant, H. (2016)
MLCut: exploring multi-level cuts in dendrograms for biological data. In C. Turkay, & T. Ruan Wan (Eds.), Computer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC)https://doi.org/10.2312/cgvc.20161288
Choosing a single similarity threshold for cutting dendrograms is not sufficient for performing hierarchical clustering analysis of heterogeneous data sets. In addition, alter...

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