Headshot of Prof. Michael Gleicher

Michael Gleicher

David DeWitt Professor
Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin, Madison
1205 University Ave
Madison, WI 53706, USA
gleicher@cs.wisc.edu

Office: 6588 Morgridge Hall (the new CS building!)

Office Hour: Summer 2026 - by appointment only

I am a professor working in areas related to Visual Computing. My research these days is mainly about robotics and data visualization. With both, I am interested in how we can make them useful for people. I remain interested in animation, virtual reality, multimedia, …

I have been recognized as the David DeWitt Professor of Computer Sciences, an ACM Fellow, a member of the IEEE Visualization Academy, and an IEEE Senior Member. I also hold a concurrent position as an Amazon Design ScholarWhenever I mention that, I am supposed to say “This work is not connected to Amazon.com”..

A brief biography will tell you how I got here. You can see a reasonably current CV, but you probably are looking for papers, talks, videos or advice.

Teaching: Fall 2026: CS765 Data Visualization

I have some pages with various Advice I generally give to students. This includes the format for status reports, what I’d like to see in Prelims and Theses, my grad school FAQ, or my advice on how to give a talk.

You might be interested in my grad school FAQ. Come and talk to me if you’re interested in data visualization, robotics, computer graphics or related topics. If you are an undergrad and looking to work on a project, please see Undergrad Research, Projects and Directed Studies. If you are asking about a reference letter, please see Reference Letters for Students in Classes.

If you’re interested in joining our group, come talk to me! If you aren’t a student at Wisconsin yet, please look at my grad school FAQ, particularly the last few questions.

Research Themes

I am consolidating my research portfolio. Here are the current main threads. For a more complete list of recent efforts, see Selected Research Themes (current and historic)

Visualization: bridging the research/practice gap: Visualization research (and practical wisdom) knows a lot about how to make effective visualizations. However, people still make terrible (or at least ineffective) things. How do we get the knowledge of visualization out into people’s hands so that they can use it? How can we best codify, represent, organize, present, (more verbs) visualization/design knowledge.
Automating Media Production for Education: Making good educational media is hard: it requires content knowledge, pedagogical abilities, production skill, and a lot of effort. I want to create tools that reduce this burden. Some of this is “me-search”: I want the tools to improve my own teaching. However, intellectually, it connects many of the things I am interested in: automated media generation, understanding how design connects to communicative effectiveness, human-automation collaboration, etc.
Geometry-based Human-Centric Robotics: I am interested in the human centric aspects of robotics: how people specify what a robot should do, interpret what a robot is inspecting, verify that a robot has a valid plan, etc. I am interested in geometric approaches to these problems, where we use our knowledge of geometry and optimization to devise solutions. This work is sometimes application-driven, such as considering using robots for inspection, and sometimes problem-driven, such as trying to develop efficient coverage planners.
Visualization Foundations: We are exploring very basic questions in how to present information with visualizations and how to have a good process to make effective visualizations.

Teaching

These are the main classes I teach. You can see more on the Graphics Group Courses Page.

Older classes are so old they’ve been removed from the catalog!

  • CS777: Computer Animation is a graduate level CS class for people with some graphics background. This taught was taught regularly in the past (2013, 2011, 2006, 2004, 2003). It kindof died off from lack of interest (student interest and my interest)
  • CS679 Computer Games Technologies: this class was popular, so I tried to teach it regularly for several years 2012, 2011, 2010).
  • Advanced Graphics: In the Spring of 2009, I taught an Advanced Graphics class.

You can find other information on graphics group classes on the Graphics Group Courses Page.

Selected Recent Publications

A (pretty) complete list is available here. Here are some selected recent ones:

Robotics/Sensing

Visualization