Arvind Satyanarayan, Associate Professor, MIT

Title: Intelligence Augmentation through the Lens of Interactive Data Visualization

Abstract: Recent rapid advances in machine learning have brought new energy to the future of human + machine partnerships. In this talk, I will use three research threads on interactive data visualization to better understand the balance between automation and augmentation. First, I will describe how new specifications of visual and non-visual data representations allow us to reason about visual perception and cognition. Second, I will explore how visualization can be used to bridge human mental models and machine-learned representations. And, finally, I will discuss how data visualization already exhibits an epistemological crisis of truth—one that generative models threaten to further widen.

Bio: Arvind Satyanarayan is Associate Professor of Computer Science at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He leads the MIT Visualization Group, which uses visualization as a lens to explore how software systems can enhance our creativity and cognition, while respecting our agency. Arvind’s work has been recognized with an IEEE VGTC Significant New Researcher award, an NSF CAREER and Google Research Scholar award, a Kavli fellowship, best paper awards at academic venues (e.g., ACM CHI and IEEE VIS), and honorable mentions amongst practitioners (e.g., Kantar’s Information is Beautiful Awards). Visualization systems he has helped develop are widely used in industry (including at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix), on Wikipedia, and by the Jupyter/Python data science communities.

Join us in the lab or on Zoom (register here).