Professional Career
Wilkinson wrote SYSTAT, a statistical software package, in the early 1980s. This program was noted for its comprehensive graphics, including the first software implementation of the heatmap display now widely used among biologists. After his company grew to 50 employees, he sold it to SPSS in 1995. At SPSS, he assembled a team of graphics programmers who developed the nViZn platform that produces the visualizations in SPSS, Clementine, and other analytics products. The nViZn platform was modeled after Wilkinson's book on statistical graphics, The Grammar of Graphics. This book also served as the foundation for the R package ggplot2, the Python Bokeh package, the R package ggbio, and the Polaris project at Stanford. Wilkinson now serves as VP of Data Visualization at the Machine Learning Company Skytree, Inc.
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