Biography

Mark Grundland loves to bring beautiful ideas to life. As a data science and product management consultant with over 20 years of experience in research and development, his approach combines the creative mindset of a designer with the commercial passion of an entrepreneur. Bridging the gap between technology and market opportunity, he regularly advises tech startups on commercializing innovation in software, data, internet, and mobile applications, ranging from online marketing and social media to medical imaging and 3D printing. Currently, Mark Grundland is working with Vanguard Strategy and Pfizer to analyze big data sets of patient treatment histories in order to construct a predictive model of market opportunities for drug repurposing. Previously, as a data scientist with Skimlinks, he investigated the contextual and behavioral factors that signal purchase intent, distinguishing people who are just browsing online from those who are ready to buy online. He graduated with a Ph.D. in image processing from the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass statistical modeling, computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, information visualization, and user experience design.

Keynote

Winning Ways for Your Visualization Plays

What enables an effective data visualization to deliver insight at a glance? This talk presents practical techniques for how information visualization design can take better account of the fundamental limitations of visual perception, exploring the design choices that determine whether a picture can meaningfully convey the data set it is meant to represent.

Data deserves to be seen. In an information economy, there is no shortage of information; only genuine understanding is in short supply. Knowledge workers are continually asked to make sense of more information than they could possibly have time to read and assimilate. Users have come to demand insight at a glance: the whole picture, not just an endless list of results. After all, as information becomes ever more abundant, attention remains as scarce as ever. Visualization, animation, and interaction can be gainfully employed to develop information systems that are both useful, enabling users to get the job done well, and usable, empowering users to do job with ease. Effective information visualization should be immediately appealing to the eye and directly relevant to the task, routinely enjoyable to the user and uniquely valuable to the business. By integrating the power of computational analysis with the expertise of human judgment, visualization serves to turn aggregated information into actionable insight, illustrating the way numbers can tell a story compelling enough for people to make decisions they can trust. This presentation explores practical techniques for information visualization design to take better account of the fundamental limitations of visual perception. It includes examples of innovative visualizations used in a variety of applications, including a research project for Grapeshot and IBM to create an online news analysis service that tracks the relative influence of different news sources on shaping how news coverage evolves over time.