We make sense out of data.
We’re a team of visual analytics researchers who love making big, complex data useful through great visual design, compelling interaction, support for sound analytic methods, and solid engineering. We invent new visual metaphors, create analysis algorithms, and deliver software products that put useful analytic capabilities into our users’ hands. We draw expertise from across the laboratory – people like statisticians, machine vision experts, modelers, and domain scientists – to work with us to create solutions for our customers’ hardest analysis challenges.
We work with text, image, audio, video, and numerical data, helping people discover patterns, trends, relationships, and events in complex data. And we care about the sensemaking process – how new analytic workflows and reasoning strategies help people make sound decisions from their data.
Our work focuses on five core areas:
- Information Signatures: We create mathematical signatures from text, multimedia, and sensor data, discovering new ways of summarizing key features in large, heterogeneous data sets. We focus on performance and scalability, creating computationally efficient representations of complex data sets.
- Visual Design: We develop new ways to tell stories with data through visual representations. We create aesthetic depictions for complex patterns and relationships that summarize visually the output of our information signatures.
- Analytic Methods: We think a lot about thinking, and we design software and methods that guide our users in exploring and drawing valuable insight from visual representations. We help people use visualizations to create and test hypotheses, communicate results, and challenge assumptions.
- Natural User Interactions: We know that interaction with visual interfaces is where the insight happens. In addition to creating new interactive visual environments for the web, mobile devices, and desktop applications, we explore emerging techniques for gesture and touch interfaces and new display hardware that brings our users closer to their data than ever before.
- User Experience: Underlying all of our work is our ultimate goal: helping people work with information. We bring a user-centered design approach to our work, collaborating closely with users to understand their problems, test solutions, and deliver usable and useful software products.
