Hello Data! How to Design Visualizations for Humans

Welcome to Uber Visualization Night, a meetup series about design and development of visualizations. Join us at our Chelsea office for a collection of talks focused on new and interesting ways to think about design and development of data visualizations! Featuring speakers both within and outside of Uber, this talk is the first of it's kind in our New York office.

More Information About the Talks:

Giorgia Lupi, Accurat & Dear Data

Data Humanism

How can data visualization design can make a difference and make data more meaningful for people’s lives? How can we make a real difference now that the ways we relate to information are evolving more rapidly than we realize?

Now that we are past what we can call “peak infographics” and we are left with a general audience that understands much more of what we’re doing in our profession: an audience that is ready to welcome a second wave of more meaningful and thoughtful visualizations.

Giorgia will discuss how to see this moment as an opportunity to jumpstart a new renaissance, where we can question the impersonality of a merely technical approach to data, where we are ready to reconnect numbers to what they really stand for: which are more and more our lives.

Adam Krebs and Shan He, Uber

Building web-based geospatial visualizations with deck.gl

Map are derivatives of our physical world. We want maps to tell us something, to reveal patterns and tell stories underneath the abstract shapes and colors. How do we embed maps with our rich location data, how do we render a million points of events with a blink of eye and, most importantly, how do we derive insights from it.

At Uber, location data is our biggest asset. The data visualization team built its own geospatial application to visualize millions of location data in the browser. It uses vocabularies including layers and filters to embed various types of data points and creates maps with a click of a button. Powered by deck.gl (https://uber.github.io/deck.gl/) - our open source webGL based visualization library, It helps us understand trends and anomaly behind the data and allow us to deep dive into what can not be seen.

In this talk we will discuss visualization enabled location intelligence. We will talk about how and why we built our own geospatial visualization tool, and how did we use it to visualize location data in a meaningful way.

Enrico Bertini, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Expanding The Horizon: From Data Visualization To Interactive Data Analysis

Enrico will provide a few personal reflections on the state of data visualization and will argue that we as a community are a bit too fixated with visual representation and that many challenges ahead of us pertain to the more general problem of "interacting with data". There are lots of important societal and scientific problems out there we can help people solve if we embrace our role as toolsmiths of interactive data thinking tools fully. This requires understanding how people can and should think with data and designing interactive tools that help people think effectively and smartly.

Schedule:

6:00pm - Doors open

6:00pm-6:35pm - Food, drinks, networking

6:35pm-6:40pm - Welcome by Jon Sadka, Software Engineer @ Uber

6:40pm-7:00pm - Talk 1 (Giorgia Lupi, Accurat)

7:00pm-7:20pm - Talk 2 (Adam Krebs & Shan He, Uber)

7:20pm-7:40pm - Talk 3 (Enrico Bertini, NYU)

7:40pm-8:15pm - Wrap up, Mingle

Please RSVP here. Open spots will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. We will send out further information closer to the date, so be sure to mark "I'm going" to get updates as they come out.

Look forward to seeing you there!