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Jeffery HeerJeffrey Heer
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Stanford University
Interactive Tools for Data Transformation and Visualization

Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

The increasing scale and accessibility of digital data -- including government records, corporate databases, and logs of online activity -- provides an under-exploited resource with which we might better understand and improve governance, business, academic research, and our personal lives. However, for the data to prove broadly useful, diverse groups of people must be able to make sense of it. Enabling a broad class of data analysts to more effectively work with data remains a fundamental challenge in both human-computer interaction and systems research. In this talk, I will discuss our research attempting to address this challenge through novel interactive systems for data manipulation and visualization. These projects include Wrangler -- a visual interface for data formatting, cleaning, and validation; Protovis -- a declarative language for web-based data visualization; and sense.us-- a platform for asynchronous, collaborative visual analysis. Collectively, these projects highlight various components within the data analysis lifecycle in need of further research attention.

Jeffrey Heer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he works on human-computer interaction, visualization, and social computing. His research investigates the perceptual, cognitive, and social factors involved in making sense of large data collections, resulting in new interactive systems for visual analysis and communication. He also led the design of the Prefuse, Flare, and Protovis visualization toolkits, in use by researchers, corporations, and thousands of data enthusiasts. Heer is the recipient of the 2009 ACM CHI Best Paper Award, Faculty Awards from IBM and Intel, and was named to MIT Technology Review's 2009 TR35. He holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Helen-Nicole Kostis

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040