Shizuhiko Nishisato, University of Toronto

Career Award for Lifetime Achievement

Joint graphical display of quantified contingency tables has been very popular for at least the past 60 years under the name of “correspondence plot” or French plot. Nishisato (1980), however, completely ignored correspondence plot, instead provided algebraic structure of information involved in the contingency table. His exposition clearly suggests that the correspondence plot is not accurate. In 1984, Michael Greenacre, who completed his Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of Jean-Paul Benzecri, published a highly acclaimed book, which further popularized the correspondence plot. Carroll, Green and Schaffer (1986) proposed the CGS scaling as a better alternative to the correspondence plot, but they miserably failed to convince Greenacre (1989). Facing a strong opposition from the correspondence-plot school, Nishisato continued to convince the users of correspondence plots with his theory of doubled dimension, and after incredible struggles, finally published an algebraically exact plot in 2019, which we now call “Canonical Plot.”

about the speaker

Born on June 9, 1935 in Sapporo, Japan.  BA and MA in experimental psychology, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.  Ph.D. in psychometrics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. with thesis “Minimum entropy clustering of test items” (Supervisor R. Darrell Bock).

1966, Research associate, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
1967-2000, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto.
[ Assistant Professor (1967-1969), Associate Professor (1969-1971), Chairman of the Department of Measurement and Evaluation (1971-1976), Professor (1976-2000), Professor Emeritus (2000 to date)].

Psychometric Society (President, Editor of Psychometrika, Trustee)
American Statistical Association (Fellow)
Classification Society of North America (Trustee)
International Federation of Classification Societies (Chair of the Awards Committee)
Japanese Classification Society (Fellow, Life-long achievement award)
Japanese Behaviormetric Society (Honorary member, Life-long achievement award, publication award)
German Classification Society(GfKl) (Editorial Board for Studies in Classification, for some 20 years)
Metropolitan Toronto Japanese Family Services (President, Volunteer of the Year Award from the Government of Ontario)
University of North Carolina Psychology Alumni Association (Distinguished Alumnus Award).

Career outputs:  18 books, over 200 journal papers.