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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
Eileen Kraemer didn’t mind that she was the only girl in her high school wood-shop class. From the time she’d been a little girl, she had had a passion for finding out how things work. What could be more complex than designing and building a cabinet?
A lot, it turns out.
Kraemer now takes large, complex computer programs and transforms them into visual images on computer screens, making it much easier to solve problems in everything from medical  diagnostics to the routing of trains.
“The field of human-computer interactions is really growing,” says Kraemer, an assistant professor of computer science who joined the UGA faculty in 1998. “The need for better graphical interfaces will only increase.”
The issue may seem arcane. It isn’t. As computer programs get larger and larger, trouble-free operation becomes more difficult, as anyone who works daily on a personal computer knows. Most programs used on PCs, however, are child’s play compared to the kinds that are crucial, say, to the operation of a nuclear-power plant or the coordination of trains on a section of urban track.
The people who monitor these kinds of systems need a way to visualize what’s happening, because they don’t have time to stare at a read-out of numbers and computer code. Not only that, the operators must know if the program is operating properly so the data is reliable.
Kraemer grew up on Long Island, and from childhood, she knew that she was destined to be a scientist.
“Maybe I liked the white coats,” she says, laughing, “but I just always knew I liked finding out how things worked.”
From her wood-shop class to the operation of sewing looms, Kraemer’s fascination only grew. She earned a degree in biology, and for a time volunteered at a hospital while considering a future in medicine. The experience made her realize, however, that “real life” didn’t fascinate her nearly as much as the world of ideas.
“The more abstract it got, the better I liked it,” she says. “That made becoming a doctor a lot less likely.”
After teaching in secondary schools for a couple of years, getting married and having her first child (Michael--now 19 and a student at UGA), Kraemer began a master’s program in computer science at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. At first going to school at night (her husband was in law school at the same time), she later won a fellowship and became a day student.
She and her husband moved to Atlanta where he had a job with a law firm, and she took a few years with her growing family before going on to finish a doctoral degree in computer science at Georgia Tech.
After graduation, Kraemer accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor of computer science and director of the Computer Visualization Laboratory. After two years there, the family (now with three children) moved back to Atlanta, where Kraemer’s husband accepted a new position with Kimberly-Clark and she joined the faculty at UGA.
Kraemer’s research involves finding ways to display information so that responses can be quick and accurate. She’s working with UGA physicist David Landau on finding a way to visualize the simulated behavior of so-called “thin films”--coatings that are crucial in business and industry.
She also has a collaborative project with UGA geneticists John McDonald and Daniel Promislow to find better ways to locate genetic elements known as retrotransposons.
Kraemer also teaches two sections of a course on human-computer interaction. Her students must design and construct a graphical interface that focuses on usability.
As computers get more complicated and more powerful, the problems to be solved grow harder as well. Kraemer is working on something called interactive steering, which allows minor changes in long-running computer programs to give a more accurate solution or to reach a solution more quickly.
If all this seems difficult and impersonal, remember that computer visualization experts make your MRI accurate and allow air traffic controllers to guide your plane to a safe landing.
It doesn’t get much more personal than that.
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