Fernanda Viégas is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard with an affiliation at the Harvard Business School.
She co-leads the Insight + Interaction Lab with Professor Martin Wattenberg, and is a Sally Starling Seaver Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Fernanda is also a Principal Scientist at Google, where she co-founded the PAIR (People + AI Research) initiative and the Big Picture team. Her work in machine learning focuses on improving Human/AI interaction with a broader agenda of democratizing AI technology. She is also interested in weaving societal expectations and values into the design and evaluation of AI systems.
Her work in data visualization is known for its contributions to social and collaborative visualization. The systems she, Martin and their teams have created are used daily by millions of people. Her passion for making complex data understandable to lay viewers has led her to visualize wind currents, study collaboration patterns in Wikipedia, and create dynamic maps of news around the world. Her visualization-based artwork with Martin has been exhibited worldwide, and is part of the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art in New York. She holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab. Fernanda is originally from Brazil and misses the jungle and the year-round warm weather in Rio de Janeiro where she grew up.