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March 15, 2022

Keynote: What makes intelligent visual analytics tools really intelligent? | Vidya Setlur | Tableau

About This Video

Vidya Setlur, Director of Tableau Research, Tableau, presents a Keynote at the WiDS Worldwide conference.

In this keynote, Vidya will discuss how natural language can be leveraged in various aspects of the analytical workflow ranging from smarter data transformations, visual encodings, autocompletion to supporting analytical intent, to conversational interfaces. With a better understanding of how users explore data in their flow of analysis, can people doing analysis be supported by more intelligent tools? In this keynote, we will explore this question.


In This Video
Head Of Research, Tableau,

My area of expertise is in natural language processing and computer graphics. I love pushing the boundaries of product innovation through a principled fashion, drawing from both research and engineering. I graduated from Northwestern University in 2005 with a Ph.D. in computer science.

Since joining Tableau Research in 2012, I have worked on various projects and prototypes involving semantics and visual representation. I have also been deeply interested in exploring analytical conversation using natural language interaction via a system I developed called Eviza. Subsequently, as part of productizing Tableau’s natural language feature, Ask Data, I moved to engineering and was a manager on the Natural Language Team at Tableau Software. There I focused primarily on developing the theory and engineering of user intent in conversational interaction.

I currently head the Tableau Research team, a group of multidisciplinary research scientists where we work on various research and innovation initiatives to help our customers see and understand their data.