Dashboards and Daemons: Visualization at the very top and bottom of the stack

These talks sound dynamite.

Seemant Kulleen's talk:

A dashboard is more than a collection of widgets: it is a storytelling medium.
Empathy-driven dashboard design approaches interactive//unfolding storytelling through data visualization and customer/user experience.

My work history is a combination of ux design, product management, programming and customer engagement. I cut my teeth in open source and have worked in medical devices, cloud computing, and even in the AI department of a bank once.
These days, I use empathy-driven design to create highly customized and interactive dashboards.

A self-described “Professional Geek”, Steve Okay has over 20 years of experience hacking on *NIX systems and making them do his bidding in a range of fields including air traffic control, high-performance computing, Hollywood feature films, defense, disaster recovery and robotics. He is currently consulting in the robotics industry and is an avid skater & snowboarder.

He'll be presenting on:

A Social Graph for Daemons: Visualizing machine-machine communication with semantic clustering.

Much has been made of graphing and mapping human social interactions over social applications like Facebook and Twitter; how ideas and memes spread, what makes something “go viral”, identifying key influencers, “stickiness”, etc. The servers and networks and applications that make up these and other services that run our world have their own “social lives” too, and with the right visualization tools and techniques, we can map them out. The picture that emerges is not one of a single sterile system humming along with ruthless Borg-like deterministic consistency, but instead an assemblage of things that worked in their own quirky, chaotic way which ebb and flow, have moods and fits and show the fingerprints of its creators all over it.

For September, instead of presentations, we're going to aim to organize a data viz sprint, pairing people at different levels together to work on visualizing data around a theme. If you're interested in helping out with this or participating, drop me a line or comment here - my gmail tends to hide/swallow the meetup emails, so it helps to know it's coming.