I help people understand their data, and act on it.

I'm a researcher and designer; I work with users to help them best understand and act on their data. I love getting to know how people think about complex data problems, and then designing tools to support their most critical tasks.

I worked as Principal Design Researcher for Honeycomb from 2018–2022, where I built user experiences designed to help SREs and on-call engineers understand failures in their distributed systems. Before that, I spent fourteen years at Microsoft Research, working in human-computer interaction and data visualization. I received my PhD from the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. I've carried out research on big data and progressive analytics, approximate querying, and understanding user experiences around data.

I've co-authored and edited three books: “Progressive Data Analysis” (Eurographics, 2024), “Making Data Visual” (O’Reilly, 2017) and “From Usenet to CoWebs” (Springer, 2003), as well as technical and academic articles. I am a co-inventor on over 30 patents.

Recently, I've been spending my time getting to understand how the human visual system works best with AI. How can we take advantage of the amazing things that our eyes and brains can do, while also harnessing the advantages of AI systems?

My books, papers, and talks are collected on the Publications page, and the full list of papers is on Google Scholar.

Introducing me at an event or on a show? Here's a short bio and headshots.