The recipient of the 2022 award for the outstanding doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction is Dr. Nicole B. Sultanum.
Dr. Sultanum’s dissertation, Text-centric Visual Approaches to Support Clinical Overview of Medical Text, innovates and integrates computational methods to support clinicians’ effective and efficient review of unstructured clinical note datasets. Dr. Sultanum approached the problem of data sensemaking by finding methods to reconcile and leverage tacit domain knowledge of experts, to develop meaningful visualizations for pattern recognition and insight discoveries. Major contributions of her thesis include a graphics + text general approach which leverages a balanced mix of data visualization summaries and text-based views to solve the issue of navigation within large text collections; a semi-automated curation mechanism which allows the user to isolate information of interest while making sense of large text corpora; and a list of principled design requirements and innovative interaction and visualization techniques for effective mediated interaction with black-box automation. These contributions are grounded in a deep understanding of medical practice and validated through empirical evaluations with clinicians from four different institutions in Canada, guaranteeing a diverse pool of experts from which empirical data was collected. This work earned Dr. Sultanum the best paper honourable mention award at the ACM CHI conference in 2018. The thesis contributes highly original results which have redefined how to build visual analytics solutions aimed to enable the understanding of very large, unstructured text corpora aided by natural language processing.
Dr. Sultanum demonstrated that her approach generalizes to other domains; her work published at the IEEE VIS 2021 conference transfers the graphics + text approach to investigative journalism. The thesis contributes a novel mechanism for analysts to define thematic filters that leverage medical taxonomies to prune out information clutter not immediately relevant as well as aggregate related information together. This enables analysts to specify preferences for a particular task context or specialty and to iteratively refine and correct automated processes which are used to curate and visualize relevant information. This was followed by the development of ChartWalk, a system developed through a user-centered process involving close collaboration and evaluation with clinicians. ChartWalk enables visual summaries and interaction flows tightly aligned with clinicians’ information needs and allows clinicians to analyze hundreds of clinical records at once. Dr. Sultanum’s work on ChartWalk received a best paper honourable mention award at the IEEE VIS Conference 2022, the premier venue in visualization.
Dr. Sultanum works at Tableau Research as a Senior Research Staff member. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Fanny Chevalier and Dr. Michael Brudno. She interned at Microsoft Research, Adobe Research and Autodesk Research during her Ph.D. program; prior to that, she also worked at IBM Research as a Research Software Engineer, where she authored numerous patents. Dr. Sultanum has published in many top-tier academic venues in HCI and Visualization. In addition to reviewing for many high-impact conferences and journals, she has been an organizing or program committee chair for CHI, VIS and GI. She is also the recipient of many international, national, and university fellowships and awards: the competitive Wolfond Scholarship in Wireless Information Technology in 2015, which is granted to outstanding scholars in human-computer interaction research, the Robert E. Lansdale/Okino Computer Graphics Graduate Fellowship in 2018, the General Motors Women in Science and Mathematics Award in 2019, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship in 2019, the Didi Graduate Student Award in 2019, the Doctoral Completion Award in 2021, and the Monica Ryckman Bursary in 2022.