Danielle Szafir: Using Color in Visualization

Monday, October 16 at 6 PM Eastern

Abstract:
Color is frequently used to encode values in visualizations. For color encodings to be effective, the mapping between colors and values must preserve important differences in the data. However, most guidelines for effective color choice in visualization are based on qualitative intuition requiring substantial design expertise to implement or complex color science models that make assumptions about the state of the world that do not hold for visualizations in practice. These limitations mean that most people either apply colors to their visualizations using painstaking manual tuning processes or rely on defaults that, if chosen poorly, can lead to data misinterpretation. This talk discusses our recent efforts to improve color use in data visualization, focusing both on better understanding how people perceive colors in visualizations and using these models to drive improved design tools for rapid and effective visualization design.

Bio:
Danielle Albers Szafir is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the department, she was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, an Affiliate Professor of Information Science and Aerospace Engineering, and a Fellow in the ATLAS Institute and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research, which sits at the intersection of information visualization, data science, and cognitive science, has been integrated into leading tools such as D3 and Tableau and received best paper awards at IEEE VIS, IEEE VR, ACM CHI, and IS&T CIC. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30: Science list in 2018 and received the NSF CAREER Award in 2021. Her work is funded by the NSF, NIH, US Air Force, J.P. Morgan Chase, U.S. Space Force, and DHHS. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Washington as a NASA Space Grant Scholar and a doctorate in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.