Wendy Plesniak

Research Fellow, the Surgical Planning Laboratory (SPL),
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

I design and develop visual displays and interfaces for complicated information and processes used in analysis, evaluation, communication and artistic expression. I work on: developing content, visual design, interaction and interfaces that help people understand and use tools and information.

I'm also interested in the application of creative design and new technologies to inform and engage communities and to address challenges in developing and underserved communities.

 
BIO
Wendy Plesniak is a Research Fellow at the Surgical Planning Lab (SPL) at Brigham and Women's Hospital where she works on the design and display of medical imaging data and on user-centered interface and interaction design for the 3D Slicer project, as part of the Neuroimage Analysis Center (NAC), the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC), the National Center for Image Guided Therapy (NCIGT) and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) efforts. She is also involved in the QueryAtlas project, an atlas-based query and visualization tool for neuroscience researchers. Throughout her career, Plesniak has blended creative and technical pursuits, often at the interface between people and interactive systems. She has developed new methods for computing holograms for the MIT MarkII holovideo display system, and co-developed the first interactive haptic hologram. She was named a World Technology Network Fellow in 2006, and has also been a Research Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Laboratory. Plesniak co-founded Carnegie Mellon University's Studio for Creative Inquiry, a research center for experimental multidisciplinary art, and was a faculty member at CMU's College of Fine Arts. She is a co-founder of ThinkCycle.org and the DesignThatMatters.org, web-based efforts to collaboratively address challenges in underserved communities and developing countries. She holds a PhD and MS from MIT, and a BSEE and BFA from Carnegie Mellon.

(text CV).

 
RESEARCH AND CREATIVE
GUI and GUI layer architecture design: At BWH/Harvard, I'm working on several aspects of version 3.0 of 3D Slicer, an open source medical image analysis and visualization software package. In this work, I'm redesigning and implementing the main application interface and interaction , designing application icons , working with users and developers to design the interface to the Editor module (for defining and editing regions of interest in volumetric data), the GUI architecture and its interface to the application layer; leading a user-centered design and usability effort , and designing a new brand and accompanying visual communication guidelines for the software package.

volume-series medical data: At BWH/Harvard, I'm designing and building software for clinicians, engineers and researchers to analyze and visualize functional MRI (fMRI) timeseries and other high-dimensional medical image data.

computational holography: At the MIT Media Lab, I experimented with Reconfigurable Image Projection (RIP) holograms, a new and flexible technique for generating computed holographic stereograms with higher spatial and angular resolution than that of conventional steregrams, and with similar computational efficiency. Our preliminary implementation of this algorithm on the MIT MarkII holographic video's PC-based compute architecture achieved scene rendering, hologram computation and display update in less than a second. In another new technique, called incremental computing, I experimented with updating interference modeled holograms incrementally and only in regions affected by scene changes.

haptic holography: In three experiments (Touch, Lathe and Poke), haptics and holograms were combined to provide colocated three-dimensional force and visual images for a user to see, inspect or modify with a hand-held haptic device (Sensable Technology's Phantom).

spatial display & interaction: This previous work investigated the rendering and spatial display of information and spatial interaction.

selected creative: Here is a brief selection of design studies, contracts, personal work, etc. which I update from time to time.

 
PUBLICATIONS
A list of selected publications can be found here.

 
COMMUNITY
International Human Rights Day: Worked with local organizations to design brochures for annual community-wide public event in observance of International Human Rights Day, Boston, December 2005, 2006.

ThinkCycle.org: ThinkCycle was originally conceived by a group of graduate students at the MIT Media Lab (Nitin Sawhney, Yael Maguire, Saul Griffith, Ravi Pappu, and Wendy Plesniak) as a way to harness the collective enthusiasm and brainpower of academics, students, and experts all over the world in solving challenges (such as clean water, inexpensive eye glasses, and alternative energy sources) faced by underserved communities and developing countries. The ThinkCycle database is an online collection of well-posed, unsolved design challenges in development and sustainability proposed by NGOs and community groups. ThinkCycle was nominated for a World Technology Award in Social Entrepreneurship in 2006.

designthatmatters.org: Design that Matters (DtM) was conceived as a curriculum testbed for Thinkcycle. The original course, taught at the MIT Media Lab by graduate students, focused on engineering design for specific well-posed challenges in developing countries and underserved communities. I participated in the conceptual development of this effort. Now a Massachusetts non-profit, DtM acts as bridge to bring problems identified by NGOs and individual communities into the classroom for university engineering and business students to address, and makes available curriculum materials. Since its launch at MIT in 2000, DtM has worked with over 300 university engineering and business students to develop dozens of prototypes.

Asha's Work An Hour for Education: Asha is a non-profit, mostly student-run organization whose mission is to catalyze socio-economic change in India through the education of underprivileged children. Asha provides scholarships to children from low income groups and supports learning facilities and programs for disabled, underserved, abandoned or abused children. I helped to design and implement a new web-based fundraising campaign called Work An Hour For Education. This event, now held annually, has helped raise upwards of $700,000 to date.

 
EXTRAS
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