Seminar • Human-Computer Interaction • New Perspectives on Communicating with Visualization, From Design Inspiration to Performative Presentation

Friday, October 8, 2021 11:00 am - 11:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Please note: This talk will be given online.

Matthew Brehmer, Senior Research Staff
Tableau Research

At Tableau, our mission is to help people see and understand data. Given this mission, the aim of my research is to explore new ways of seeing and understanding data from someone else’s point of view: i.e., the use of visualization in multimodal communication.

In this talk, I will present three recent projects that focus on the communicative use of visualization, including a new approach to generating visualization design inspiration, a study of synchronous communication involving visual representations of data, and a preliminary investigation into the presence of a human presenter and their gestures when presenting data to an audience. Ultimately, the goal of these projects is to inspire new research and tools that look beyond purely analytical use cases for visualization.


Bio: Matthew Brehmer is a Senior Research Staff member of Tableau Research in Seattle. His research interests include creative expression with data for communication and presentation, visualization and interaction design for devices large and small, and the visualization of time-oriented data. Prior to joining Tableau, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research.

He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he specialized in information visualization. He also holds an undergraduate degree in cognitive science from Queen’s University. In addition to publishing research papers, he is also dedicated to connecting visualization researchers and practitioners: co-organizing the VisInPractice event at IEEE VIS and speaking at practitioner events such as OpenVisConf, the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, and the Tableau Conference. Learn more about his work at mattbrehmer.ca and connect with him online at @mattbrehmer or LinkedIn.


To join this seminar on Zoom, please go to https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/93563374786?pwd=Y0xUU1R0REYrU2xmV2lBSGloekZLdz09.