Its exciting to report on the graduations from the working group this year.
Niladri Roy Chowdhury defended his PhD thesis in Aug 2014, titled “Explorations of the lineup protocol for visual inference: application to high dimension, low sample size problems and metrics to assess the quality”, under my direction. He is a scientist at Novartis, Boston, MA. Susan Vanderplas defended her PhD in May, titled “Perception in Statistical Graphics”, under the direction of Professor Heike Hofmann.
On Nov 10 I was part of a celebration of John W. Tukey at the United Nations. This event kicked off a new UN initiative called Unite Ideas. Details of the event, and the initiative can be found here. There were five talks relayed live to an audience of several thousand, using google hangouts and a youtube channel, and listeners could post questions using the Q/A tool.
My talk was titled “An Exploratory Data Analysis of OECD’s 2012 PISA Survey”s and I delivered it by computer from my office in Iowa.
The new version of nullabor contains numerical measures that quantify how close the plot of the data is to the null plots in a lineup. It is very difficult to quantify all patterns that might be read from plots, so these should be taken in a spirit ofa Herculean task. The goal is to get some sense of what people are reacting to in a plot, which could be then associated with the text descriptions from people, or with data from an eyetracker.