Marrying Data and User with Interactive Visualization

Speaker:        Jian Zhao
                Department of Computer Science
                University of Toronto

Title:          "Marrying Data and User with Interactive Visualization"

Date:           Monday, 16 March 2015

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Recently, the amount of digital information we want to explore is growing
at a tremendous rate. The challenge of transforming such large,
heterogeneous, and complex data into useful knowledge calls for novel
computational and perceptual aids. My research employs an interactive and
visual approach to facilitate users with the discovery and communication
of insights in data. In this talk, I will discuss the phenomena that there
exists a huge divide between the raw data and the user who wants to gain
knowledge from it. I will then present a subset of my work on tackling
this problem by leveraging highly interactive visual analytics techniques.
The design studies of those techniques have touched a range of data
formats and application domains, such as time-series analysis, social
media mining, and computational linguistics. I will also outline a few
future research directions to empower the user with effective
visualizations.

***************
Biography:

Jian Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science,
University of Toronto, where he works with Dr. Ravin Balakrishnan. His
research interests, generally, are related to the areas of Visual
Analytics, Information Visualization, and Human-Computer Interaction. He
is the recipient of a Wolfond Scholarship, a Wolfond Fellowship, a Robert
E. Lansdale/Okino Graduate Fellowship, and an Honorable Mention paper
award at IEEE VAST. He is a winner of the Yelp Dataset Challenge Grand
Prize. In addition to working at University of Toronto, he collaborates
with researchers from leading industrial labs during internships at
Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and Adobe Research. Before joining
University of Toronto, he received his B.Eng. degree in Computer Science
at Zhejiang University in China. More information can be found on his
personal homepage: www.cs.toronto.edu/~jianzhao/.