Event Details

In this talk, I will explore how studying the life cycle of data visualizations offers us new opportunities to realize Douglas Engelbart’s 1960s vision of “Augmenting Human Intellect.” I will describe how my research group is using visualization to uncover abstractions learned by machine learning models, including measuring human-AI alignment and developing iconic “feature visualizations.” I will then zoom out to consider how visualizations function as sociotechnical artifacts — who designs visualizations and for whom are they designed — and how this may complicate our notions of “democratizing” data-driven work.

Speaker Bio

Arvind Satyanarayan is an NBX Career Development Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the MIT EECS department and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He leads the MIT Visualization Group which uses data visualization as a petri dish to study intelligence augmentation (IA), or how software systems help amplify our cognition and creativity while respecting our agency. His work has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award, best paper awards at premier academic venues (e.g., ACM CHI and IEEE VIS), and by practitioners (e.g., with an Information is Beautiful Award nomination). Visualization toolkits and systems he has developed with collaborators are widely used in industry (including at Apple, Google, and Microsoft), on Wikipedia, and in the Jupyter/Observable data science communities.