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Mr. Pat Hanrahan
Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Tableau Software
Mr. Pat Hanrahan is Tableau Software's Co-founder and Chief Scientist. He is also the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he teaches computer graphics. His current research involves visualisation, image synthesis, and graphics systems and architectures. Before joining Stanford he was a faculty member at Princeton. Pat has also worked at Pixar where he developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the RenderMan Interface - a protocol that allows modeling programmes to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs. Pat has received two Academy Awards for Science and Technology, the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award, and the IEEE Visualisation Career Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
When asked what makes Tableau unique, Pat answers, "Tableau’s center is really about answering questions with data. A lot of data visualisation research is really about making pretty pictures, but we worked with psychologists and graphic designers to understand how people deal with visual data and process it. We create pictures that answer questions, but we do it for businesses that want to know things about their own metrics."