Jock Mackinlay was born in Nuremberg, Germany and received his Bachelor in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of California Berkeley in 1975 and his Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Stanford University in 1986, where he pioneered the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information.
Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley.
Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of Information Visualization techniques. In 1976 Mackinlay started working as a Systems Analyst for the Bank of America in San Francisco. In 1977 he became a Systems Analyst at Minimax Research Corporation.
From 1979 to 1986 he was Research Assistant at Stanford University.
In 1986 he joined Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he collaborated with the User Interface Research Group to develop many novel applications of computer graphics for information access, coining the term "Information Visualization". Much of the fruits of this research can be seen in his 1999 published book, Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, written and edited with Stuart K. He holds numerous patents in user interfaces and visual analysis.
He joined Tableau Software in 2004 as Director of Visual Analysis. From 1997 until 2003 (?) he was Associate Editor of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
