VDS 2015

Bio: Stéfan van der Walt is an assistant researcher at BIDS and a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has been involved in the development of scientific open source software for more than a decade and enjoys teaching Python at workshops and conferences. Stéfan is the founder of scikit-image and a contributor to numpy, scipy, and dipy. Outside work, he enjoys traveling, running, and photographing the great outdoors.

Bio: Torsten Möller is a professor at the University of Vienna, Austria, since 2013. Between 1999 and 2012 he served as a Computing Science faculty member at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from Ohio State University in 1999 and a Vordiplom (BSc) in mathematical computer science from Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM, and a member of Eurographics. His research interests include algorithms and tools for analyzing and displaying data with principles rooted in computer graphics, image processing, visualization and human-computer interaction. He heads the research group of Visualization and Data Analysis. He served as the appointed Vice Chair for Publications of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) between 2003 and 2012. He has served on a number of program committees and has been papers co-chair for IEEE Visualization, EuroVis, Graphics Interface, and the Workshop on Volume Graphics as well as the Visualization track of the 2007 International Symposium on Visual Computing. He has also co-organized the 2004 Workshop on Mathematical Foundations of Scientific Visualization, Computer Graphics, and Massive Data Exploration as well as the 2010 Workshop on Sampling and Reconstruction: Applications and Advances at the Banff International Research Station, Canada. He is a co-founding chair of the Symposium on Biological Data Visualization (BioVis). In 2010, he was the recipient of the NSERC DAS award. He received best paper awards from IEEE Conference on Visualization (1997), Symposium on Geometry Processing (2008), and EuroVis (2010), as well as two second best paper awards from EuroVis (2009, 2012).

Bio: Jeffrey Heer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Interactive Data Lab and conducts research on data visualization, human-computer interaction and social computing. The visualization tools developed by his lab (D3.js, Vega, Protovis, Prefuse) are used by researchers, companies and thousands of data enthusiasts around the world. His group's research papers have received awards at the premier venues in Human-Computer Interaction and Information Visualization (ACM CHI, ACM UIST, IEEE InfoVis, IEEE VAST, EuroVis). Other awards include MIT Technology Review's TR35 (2009), a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship (2012), and a Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator award (2014). Jeff holds BS, MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (whom he then betrayed to go teach at Stanford from 2009 to 2013). Jeff is also a co-founder of Trifacta, a provider of interactive tools for scalable data transformation.

Bio: Rumi Chunara is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Global Public Health at New York University. Her research focuses on building novel information sources and computational techniques to describe and predict population-level public health issues. Dr. Chunara received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Medical Engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, her S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. She is a recipient of a Caltech Merit Scholarship, the MIT Presidential Fellowship, and was named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 in 2014. Her research has been funded by multiple sources including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Bio: Dr. Rachel Schutt is the Chief Data Scientist at News Corp, which includes The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, New York Post, Times of London, The Sun, The Australian; Harper Collins and Amplify. In this role, she is responsible for setting the global data strategy. Rachel was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2015, and is on the 2014 Crain's New York Business 40 under 40 list. She is the co-author of the book "Doing Data Science" based on a class she created and taught at Columbia University, where she is an adjunct professor in the Department of Statistics. Rachel is a member of the Education Board for the Institute for Data Science at Columbia. Previously, Rachel was a statistician at Google Research and holds patents based on her work in the areas of social networks, large data sets, experimental design and machine learning. She earned her PhD in Statistics from Columbia University, a Masters degree in mathematics from NYU, and a Masters degree in Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research from Stanford University. Her undergraduate degree is in Honors Mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Bio: Luke Bornn is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University. His work focuses on space-time modeling and statistical computation, with applications to structural engineering, climate, and sports.

Bio: Feifei Li is an associate professor at the School of Computing, University of Utah. He obtained his B.S. in computer engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2002 (transferred from Tsinghua University, China) and PhD in computer science from Boston University in 2007. His research focuses on the scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness issues, as well as security problems in database systems and big data management. He was a recipient for an NSF career award in 2011, two HP IRP awards in 2011 and 2012 respectively, a Google App Engine award in 2013, the IEEE ICDE best paper award in 2004, the IEEE ICDE 10+ Years Most Influential Paper Award in 2014, a Google Faculty award in 2015, and the SIGMOD Best Demonstration Award in SIGMOD 2015. He is/was the demo chair for VLDB 2014, general chair for SIGMOD 2014, PC area chair for ICDE 2014 and SIGMOD 2015, and associate editor for IEEE TKDE.