After an early career working in startups and interactive 2D animation software, Fekete joined
INRIA. He is currently the Scientific Leader of the Aviz group, which he created in 2006. Aviz is an INRIA group, and also part of
Université Paris-Saclay. Fekete's main fields of research are
visual analytics,
information visualization and
human–computer interaction. Fekete developed the Infovis Toolkit, a Java
toolkit to facilitate the design of information visualization interfaces; and later expanded this work into the meta-toolkit Obvious. He led the development of techniques for the interactive analysis of graphs using various representations including the early use of matrices, and their evaluation. Making visualization more accessible to social scientists and historians has been a goal in the development of several tools, e.g., to analyze social networks, or collections of structured documents. Early work on large scale visualization led to contributions on progressive analytics as a method for managing big data analysis, and the organization of a Dagsthul seminar. Additional research directions include visualization literacy, and data physicalization such as with the Zooid user interface, which received an award at UIST'2016. From 2009 to 2012 Jean-Daniel Fekete was the president of l'AFIHM, the French national equivalent of
Association for Computing Machinery SIGCHI. He has served as IEEE InfoVis Paper Co-Chair (2009–2010) and Conference Chair (2011). He was the general chair of the
IEEE VisWeek 2014 conference (Paris, France). From August 2001 to August 2002 Fekete was a visiting scientist at the
University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), which he previously visited (July to August 1998) to develop "Excentric Labeling" along with
Catherine Plaisant as a technique to display a high density of labels on maps. == Awards ==