Alex Endert
Associate Professor
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Tech

85 5th St., NW
Technology Square Research Building
Atlanta, GA 30332-0760

Office: TSRB 335
Tel. (404) 385-4477
endert@gatech.edu

about

Research Interests

As data continues to grow in size and complexity, how will interactive data analysis continue to create insights?  My primary research interests address this challenge through combining techniques from visualization, human-computer interaction, statistics, machine learning, and data mining. My students and I invent novel user interaction techniques for people to explore data through visual analytic systems. See more at our VA.lab site.

 

Select Projects

Detecting and Mitigating Biased Analysis Strategies
People are critical to human-in-the-loop visual analytics. Systems learn important domain expertise from people. However, how can we build systems that also alert people of potentially biased strategies?
Collaborative Visual Analytics
Showing collaborators what parts of the data has been explored by who helps people cover more data, maintain situational awareness, and recall the process.
Visualization by Demonstration
User interaction for visualization that lets people demonstrate intended visual mappings, data transformations, and visual representations to explore data.
Semantic Interaction for Model Steering
Coupling exploratory user interactions with analytic model parameterization increases the usability of visual analytics. We learn about users from their interactions, and adapt the computation accordingly.
Steering Multi-Attribute Scatterplot Axes
Scatterplots that show outputs of dimension reduction models suffer from interpretability and interaction complexity. Interaxis is a visual analytic technique that makes that easier.
Novel Display and Interaction Modalities for Visual Analytics
More expressive forms of user interaction enhance analytic discourse between data analysis tools and analysts. We explore how different interaction and display modalities enhance insight into data.
Analytic Provenance
Data analysis consists of many steps, interactions, questions, and other activities to achieve insight. We explore methods for aiding data analysts capture, retrieve, and leverage their analytic provenance during and after analysis.
Building, Steering, and Comparing Multiple Machine Learning Models for Visual Analytics
As the number of machine learning models continues to increase, people often have the need to consider multiple different models for a given task. We explore ways for users to build, steer, and compare multiple model types for a given task.
Visit our Visual Analytics Lab website for more!

Recent News

Congrats Dr. Saket!
April, 2020
Congrats to Dr. Bahador Saket on his successful thesis defense, titled "Visualization by Demonstration".

Congrats Dr. Wall!
April, 2020
Congrats to Dr. Emily Wall on successfully defending her thesis titled "Detecting and Mitigating Human Bias in Visual Analytics".

Keynote at VASS 2019
Endert gave the keynote presentation at the 2019 Visual Analytic Summer School (VASS).

Invited talk at UA TRIPODS event
Endert gave an invited talk titled Considering Cognitive Bias during Interactive Visual Analysis at the 2019 TRIPODS Southwest Conference.

Thanks NSF!
Endert's NSF proposal titled "Detecting and Mitigating Biased Visual Analysis Strategies" has been funded. With generous NSF support, we will develop automated methods to detect and mitigate potentially biased visual data analysis strategies.

Thanks NSF!
Endert's NSF CAREER Award has been funded. The project, titled "Visual Analytics by Demonstration for Interactive Data Analysis", will develop demonstration-based interaction techniques for visual analytics. See our project webpage for project material, and a news article for an overview of the goals.

Virginia Tech Discovery Analytics Center News Article
Check out a recent article where I reflect on my time at VT and DAC.

New Invited Talk
Endert gave an invited talk at the Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Space Science and Exploration hosted by the Keck Institute for Space Studies and Caltech-JPL. His talk discussed how immersive technology and visual analytics can help make sense of data from Mars. Watch the video here.

New Papers at IEEE VIS 2017
The VA lab presented new papers at VIS in Phoenix this year. Check them out.

VIS @ GT
Great article about the growing interest in visualization and visual analytics at Georgia Tech.

Thanks DARPA!
Our proposed project titled "User-Driven Model Steering and Curation via Inference from Interaction and Model-Space Sampling" has been awarded.

New Papers at IEEE VIS 2016
The VA lab presented new papers at VIS this year. Check them out.

Endert and Stasko Co-Taught a workshop at the US Air Force Academy
The workshop helped integrate visual analytics into the course curricula of the USAFA and US Coast Guard Academy. Endert and Stasko worked with small groups of professors and instructors from the service academies to integrate visual analytics into the learning objectives of their courses.

Endert gave the visual analytics overview talk at VASS 2016
Alex was invited to speak at VASS 2016. His talk gave an overview of visual analytics to an audience of students and practitioners attending this iteration of the summer school at Middlesex University.

New Papers at IEEE VIS 2015
Check out the 3 new papers published at IEEE VIS 2015 in Chicago.

GVU Brownbag Seminar
Alex Endert presented at a recent GVU Brownbag Seminar. His presentation titled "Toward Interactive Visual Affordances for Visual Analytics" discusses a new interaction design space for interactive visual data exploration.

Thanks GVU and iPaT! 
We're excited to hear that the GT GVU Center and iPaT has funded the GT VIS group. The grant is titled "Reimagining Humanities Visualization: A Research-Through-Design Workshop for Civic and Cultural Data".

Thanks MSR! 
Our proposal titled "Data-Driven Decision-Making via Visual Analytics on the Microsoft Surface Hub" has been funded. The GT VIS Group looks forward to exploring the new interaction modalities for visual analytics.

Thanks PNNL!
Our proposal on "Sensemaking for Streaming Visual Analytics" has been funded by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory research initiative called Analysis in Motion.

We created the GT VIS group!
Check us out at vis.gatech.edu. If you want to stop by next time you're in Atlanta, let us know.

Teaching

Spring, 2023
CS4460 - Introduction to Information Visualization

Spring, 2023
CS6730 - Data Visualization Principles & Applications

Fall, 2021
CS4460 - Introduction to Information Visualization

Spring, 2021
CS4460 - Introduction to Information Visualization

Fall, 2020
CS7450 - Information Visualization

Spring, 2020
CS8803 - Visual Data Analysis (VDA)

Fall, 2019
CS4460 - Introduction to Information Visualization

Spring, 2019
CS4460 - Introduction to Information Visualization

Fall, 2018
CS4460 - Introduction to Information Visualization

Spring, 2018
CS8803 - Visual Data Analysis (VDA)

Fall, 2017
CS7450 - Information Visualization

Spring, 2017
CS4460 - Introduction to Information Visualization

Fall, 2016
CS7001 - Introduction to Graduate Research

Fall, 2015
CS7001 - Introduction to Graduate Research

Spring, 2015
CS8803 - Visual Data Analysis

Fall, 2014
CS7450 - Information Visualization