His research interests include human vision (particularly visual attention), consciousness, visual design, and information visualization. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from UBC in 1992, followed by a postdoc in Psychology at Harvard University. For several years he was a research scientist at Cambridge Basic Research, a lab sponsored by Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. He returned to UBC in 2000, and is part of the UBC Cognitive Systems Program, an interdisciplinary program that combines Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology. Since 2010, he has also been UBC Director of the Vancouver Institute for Visual Analytics (VIVA).