Invited Speakers

Keynote Speaker: Vidya Setlur, Tableau

Title: ACTG vs 0/1: Discovery, Curiosity, and the Power of Imperfection
Many of humanity’s most important discoveries, from penicillin to X-rays, did not emerge from perfect plans or optimized systems, but from accidents, anomalies, and the curiosity to pursue them. Biological systems, encoded in the language of ACTG, evolve through mutation, variation, and imperfection. Computational systems, built on 0s and 1s, strive for precision, optimization, and deterministic logic. Yet discovery often lies in the tension between these two worlds.

This keynote explores how curiosity, imperfect communication, and unexpected observations shape the process of discovery. Drawing from examples in science, language, and cognition, the talk highlights how insight frequently arises not from eliminating ambiguity, but from engaging with it. Visualization plays a unique role in this process: not simply as a tool for presenting answers, but as a cognitive instrument that provokes questions, reveals anomalies, and supports exploration.

By examining the interplay between biological messiness and computational precision, the talk reflects on how tools and systems might be designed to preserve the conditions for curiosity, experimentation, and creative discovery. The history of innovation suggests that imperfection is not a flaw in the process of discovery; it is often its most powerful catalyst.

Short Bio: Vidya Setlur is the Senior Director of Tableau Research, where she leads a team exploring data visualization, multimodal interaction, applied machine learning, and natural language processing. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Graphics from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on how language and semantics can inform meaningful visual depictions of data. Before joining Tableau in 2012, she was a Principal Research Scientist at the Nokia Research Center. Since then, she has contributed to various projects on semantics, data exploration systems, and the company’s first natural language feature, Ask Data. Vidya is the co-author of Functional Aesthetics for Data Visualization and is passionate about mentoring women and other underrepresented communities in technology and research.

Capstone Speaker: Michael Sedlmair, University of Stuttgart

Michael Sedlmair is a professor at the University of Stuttgart and leads the research group for Visualization and Virtual/Augmented Reality there. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Munich, Germany, in 2010. Further stops included the Jacobs University Bremen, University of Vienna, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the BMW Group Research and Technology, Munich. His research interests focus on visual and interactive machine learning, perceptual modeling for visualization, immersive analytics and situated visualization, novel interaction technologies, as well as the methodological and theoretical foundations underlying them.