Invited Speakers

Keynote Speaker: Vidya Setlur, Tableau

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.