Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI


Building powerful and intuitive data visualization tools with Vega-Lite's Dominik Moritz

March 25, 2021

Dominik shares the story and principles behind Vega and Vega-Lite, and explains how visualization and machine learning help each other.

Dominik is a co-author of Vega-Lite, a high-level visualization grammar for building interactive plots. He's also a professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and an ML researcher at Apple.

Connect with Dominik
Twitter: https://twitter.com/domoritz
GitHub: https://github.com/domoritz
Personal website: https://www.domoritz.de/

0:00 Sneak peek, intro
1:15 What is Vega-Lite?
5:39 The grammar of graphics
9:00 Using visualizations creatively
11:36 Vega vs Vega-Lite
16:03 ggplot2 and machine learning
18:39 Voyager and the challenges of scale
24:54 Model explainability and visualizations
31:24 Underrated topics: constraints and visualization theory
34:38 The challenge of metrics in deployment
36:54 In between aggregate statistics and individual examples

Links Discussed
Vega-Lite: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/
Data analysis and statistics: an expository overview (Tukey and Wilk, 1966): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1464291.1464366
Slope chart / slope graph: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/examples/line_slope.html
Voyager: https://github.com/vega/voyager
Draco: https://github.com/uwdata/draco

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Note: Transcriptions are provided by a third-party service, and may contain some inaccuracies. Please submit any corrections to angelica@wandb.com. Thank you!

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