PhD Defense: Toward Personalized Visualizations

Abstract

As we enter the age of big and messy data, visualizations have emerged as an integral part of data analysis and decision-making. Visualizations often serve as an extension to the user’s cognition, and the computer supports the user by managing large amounts of data, performing computationally difficult tasks, and providing relevant feedback to the user. In order to facilitate this human-computer collaboration, it is essential to know the user. In this talk, I present research aimed at better understanding the user's reasoning and cognitive processes. My work aims to: (1) identify key individual differences that affect reasoning with visualization systems, (2) model the user and learn their analysis behaviors, and (3) develop personalized adaptive systems.

Bio: Alvitta Ottley is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction. Her work pursues areas such as individual differences, learning and modeling user behavior, psychological priming to influence behavior, and personalized health risk communication.