I am a professor at Harvard, where I co-lead the Insight + Interaction Lab with long-time collaborator Fernanda Viégas. I'm also a part-time member of Google DeepMind's PAIR (People + AI Research) initiative, which she and I co-founded. My work currently focuses on making AI technology broadly accessible and reflective of human values.
Before focusing on machine learning at Google, I helped create end-user visualizations for products such as Search, YouTube, and Google Analytics. Prior to joining Google, Fernanda and I founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. Before that, we led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, which created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes. I came to IBM from Dow Jones, where I was the Director of Research and Development at SmartMoney.com.
My work there included some of the earliest pieces of interactive journalism. I've also created visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art. I have a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley, focusing on dynamical systems.
