009  |  Bridging academia and industry with Danyel Fisher

Hi there!

In this episode we talk about bridging academia and industry. We touched upon this issue many times in the past so we decided to record a whole a special issue on that.

To help us with it we invited Danyel Fisher, a renown Information Visualization researcher from Microsoft Research. This year Danyel is chairing the newly established Industry Track at VisWeek 2012, the leading conference in Visualization, and his job is to attract more people from industry to this traditionally pretty academic conference.

We discuss existing practices, gaps, and ways to bridge them. Here is the breakdown of the episode:

[00:00:00] Our special guest today: Danyel Fisher
[00:04:00] Relations between research and project departments at Microsoft
[00:12:39] Existing gaps between between research and practitioners
[00:16:09] Transfer of algorithms, e.g. Voronoi treemaps
[00:18:40] Visweek industry track
[00:32:03] Affordability of big conferences for individuals, lowering the threshold
[00:38:20] Live transmission from visweek?
[00:39:21] How can non-academic conferences attract more researchers?
[00:43:09] Researchers and their presence on the web
[00:50:30] Are papers an adequate publication format for visualization research?
[00:52:39] What else can we do?
[00:54:27] How to get designers to read papers
[00:59:28] Text books: Colin Ware, Tufte, Beautiful Visualization
[01:05:52] Danyel’s current research: Interaction with Big Data
[01:12:12] Final pleading for visweek and potentially exciting encounters with Moritz in an elevator

Have fun!


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9 comments

  1. Tammy says:

    What journals do you recommend following to keep up on the research in the field of data viz? Moritz mentions some useful research at around 57 minutes in the podcast – where can that be found? Thank you!

  2. Enrico says:

    The main source is the Proceedings of the IEEE InfoVis Conference (hosted by VisWeek – http://www.visweek.org) (to not be confused with the IEEE Information Visualization Conference in London which is of negligible quality). You can find the proceedings in the IEEE Digital Library or the ACM Digital Library of Google Scholar.

    You will certainly find very high quality work here too:
    – EuroVis Proceedings (where Scientific and Information Visualization papers are mixed)
    – The Information Visualization Journal (http://ivi.sagepub.com/)

    But many other source exist too where you will have to sift through in order to find quality work.

    The SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in CS (http://www.sigchi.org/conferences/) has every year a bunch of very high quality vis works too.

    I hope this helps! Let me know if you need more help.

    P.S. Tip: Many of these sources are not free but if you are interested in a specific paper very often you will find it online by typing the title and/or going to Google Scholar.

  3. Josh says:

    Danyel mentioned that John Stasko was collecting visualization lecture notes from various university courses. I’ve searched for this on the web but haven’t been able to find it. Do you have a link that you can share?

    And thanks. You guys are doing a great job with the podcasts.

  4. GoGraphs says:

    I love the comment “the vast majority of data isn’t interesting” – so valid in this day and age.

    Thanks for the podcast guys, keep up the good work!

  5. We got Robert Kosara on Data Stories for this episode. Robert is the editor of eagereyes.org , one of the most respected and well-known data visualization blogs in the Internet. He is known for his controversial and informative posts and his “academic” style (some people say ).

  6. Andrew Saul says:

    Great episode again guys. Thanks for all great resources in the show notes and links. They are invaluable to me.

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