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Bridging Semantics and Sensemaking: Designing Intelligent Tools for Visual Analytics

Series: CSA Distinguished Lecture

Speaker: Vidya Setlur,Senior Director,Tableau Research

Date/Time: Aug 12 15:00:00

Location: CSA Auditorium, (Room No. 104, Ground Floor)

Abstract:
The proliferation of data has transformed how we understand and engage with the world, creating unprecedented opportunities for deriving insights. However, making sense of complex datasets requires tools that go beyond mere computational efficiency, integrating semantics, user intent, and human perception into their design. In this talk, I will present my research on designing intelligent visual analytical tools that bridge the gap between machine intelligence and human sensemaking. I will highlight how my work explores leveraging semantics to create contextually relevant visualizations and adaptive visual elements. Additionally, I will discuss how conversational interfaces, grounded in principles of cooperative interaction, enable users to navigate analytical workflows. By combining advances in natural language processing, generative AI, and visual analytics, my research demonstrates how intelligent systems can enhance how we see and understand data. The talk will conclude with a forward-looking discussion on opportunities to further integrate AI into visual analytics, fostering human-centric, ethical designs that promote fairness, transparency, and inclusivity in data-driven tools and interfaces.

Speaker Bio:
Vidya Setlur is the senior director of Tableau Research. She leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists in areas including data visualization, multimodal interaction, statistics, applied ML, and NLP. She earned her doctorate in Computer Graphics in 2005 at Northwestern University. Her personal research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing and computer graphics to better understand data semantics and user intent to inform the meaningful visual depiction of data. Prior to joining Tableau, she worked as a principal research scientist at the Nokia Research Center for seven years. Since joining Tableau Research in 2012, Vidya has worked on various projects and prototypes involving semantics and visual representation. As part of productizing Tableaus natural language feature, Ask Data, she moved to engineering and was a manager on the Natural Language Team at Tableau Software for a couple of years. There, she focused primarily on developing the theory and engineering of user intent in analytical conversation to provide analytically useful interpretations of users utterances. In addition to her work, she enjoys mentoring women in tech and research. She recently co-wrote a book, Functional Aesthetics for Data Visualization.

Host Faculty: Prof. Vijay Natarajan