FERNANDA B. VIEGAS joined IBM's Visual Communication Lab in October of 2005. Her research focuses on the social side of visualization, exploring representations of online communities to support online identity, collective memory, and storytelling. She is particularly interested in exploring how the persistent nature of today’s communication technologies can transform the ways in which we think about personal and public information. Her work in visualization, interface design, and computer-mediated interaction is a reference in the field of social visualization around the world. Some of her projects explored email archives, newsgroup conversations, chatroom interactions, and the editing history of wiki pages (Fernanda and Martin Wattenberg created History Flow at IBM). She is also the creator of the award-winning Chat Circles program, an abstract graphical interface for communicating online. Her projects have been exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston and in galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Current research interests include visualizing social dynamics in open-source communities, exploring collaborative uses of visualization applications, and investigating online privacy as it applies to visualization.
Viegas received her doctoral and master's degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, and her bachelor's degree in Graphic Design and Art History from the University of Kansas.