Arvind Satyanarayan

personal website

Higher-level Tools for Interactive Data Visualization

May 24th, 14:30
Ada Lovelace/PCRI building (650) at University of Paris-Saclay, room 445

Abstract

Interactive data visualization has gone mainstream. From business intelligence to data-driven journalism, society has embraced the use of visualization to record, analyze, and communicate data. While a number of toolkits and systems facilitate the authoring of visual encodings, interaction design continues to require low-level programming expertise. In this talk, I will present a new stack of tools for interactive data visualization. At the foundation are Vega and Vega-Lite: visualization grammars that enable visual encodings and interaction techniques to be expressed as declarative specifications. These specifications are particularly amenable for programmatic generation by higher-level tools. I will demo one such system, Lyra, which provides a direct-manipulation graphical interface for visualization design. This ecosystem of tools is seeing broader adoption (e.g., integrations with Wikipedia and Jupyter) and holds the promise of interoperability. As the ecosystem matures, users can produce exploratory data visualizations with one tool, and export it to another for further design customization for example.


Biography

Arvind Satyanarayan is a Computer Science PhD candidate at Stanford University, where he works with Jeffrey Heer (UW) on new languages and systems for visualization design. Arvind is also an advisor at Apropose Inc., a Bay Area start-up he co-founded to build data-driven web design applications.