Data Presentations: Or why 'Letting the Data Speak for Itself isn't that easy'

Abstract:

We've got more data available to us than ever before and there's an imperative to understand and communicate effectively with that data. We explore some of the concepts of communicating with data and why any single visualization has biases built in through the choice of the data, transformations, and their representation. To illustrate some of these ideas, I'll use SandDance, (www.sanddance.ms) a publicly available research project that uses unit visualizations and multiple views to help users capture insights and create compelling stories.

Speaker bio:

Dr. Steven M. Drucker is a Principal Researcher in the Visual Interaction in Business and Entertainment (VIBE) group at Microsoft Research (MSR) and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. His research focuses on human computer interaction for dealing with large amounts of information. In particular, he is exploring democratizing the process of understanding and explaining information through the creation of tools that facilitate discovery and communication of insights through natural interaction and storytelling techniques. He received an MSc in Robot Learning from the AI Lab at MIT and a PhD in computer graphics at the MIT Media Lab.

During his career at Microsoft, he has demonstrated his work on stage with Bill Gates and Satya Nadella; shipped software on the web and PowerBI for a compelling way to explore and present data; created a web service for gathering and acting on information collected on the web; was written up in the New York Times; filed over 108 patents; and published over 100 papers on technologies as diverse as exploratory search, information visualization, multi-user environments, online social interaction, hypermedia research, human and robot perceptual capabilities, robot learning, parallel computer graphics, spectator oriented gaming, and human interfaces for camera control.