Report on the Invited Lecture by Pat Hanrahan, Titled “On Being in the Right Space”

The invited lecturer Pat Hanrahan is a professor at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-9025, USA.The talk given by Prof. Hanrahan was about the connection between semantic constraints and aesthetics in graph drawing and information visualization. Examples were given of different application contexts where, in order to convey the right semantic information in a diagram, it is essential to respect geometric constraints concerning the shape of the edges and /or the relative position of the vertices. These examples include drawing maps (such as the map of the metro), visualizing (portions of) the Internet, and representing chemical maps.