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Robert Kosara
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Scott Sherman
Principal Research Scientist

Vidya Setlur

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About

Vidya Setlur is a principal research scientist, and works out of the Palo Alto office. Prior to joining Tableau, she worked as a principal research scientist at the Nokia Research Center for 7 years. She earned her doctorate in Computer Graphics in 2005 at Northwestern University. Her area of expertise is in natural language processing and computer graphics. She loves pushing the boundaries of product innovation in a principled fashion drawing from both research and engineering.

Her research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing and computer graphics. In particular, the goal of her work is to develop new computer algorithms and user interfaces that enhance visual communication and understanding of the semantics of the underlying data. Her research combines concepts and methods from information retrieval, human perception and cognitive science to help users effectively interact with devices and information in their environment. A significant portion of her work covers investigation, prototyping and evaluation of such novel concepts.

Since joining Tableau Research in 2012, Vidya has worked on various projects and prototypes involving semantics and visual representation such as semantic icon encoding and semantically resonant color palettes. She has also been interested in exploring analytical conversation using natural language interaction via a system called Eviza. Subsequently, as part of productizing Tableau's natural language feature, Ask Data, she moved to engineering and was a manager on the Natural Language Team at Tableau Software. There she focused primarily on developing the theory and engineering of user intent in analytical conversation to provide analytically useful interpretations of users' utterances among other things. With the first release of the feature and the second release in Beta, she has moved back to research to explore medium and longer term natural language product initiatives at Tableau. She is also passionate about driving telemetry efforts at Tableau starting with Ask Data, and determining ways to instrument and consume usage data to further improve the product.

A full list of her publications can be found here.

Focus

  • Computer Graphics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • HCI
  • Mobile Computing
  • Content Retargeting
  • Iconography
  • Maps

Papers

Towards Understanding How Readers Integrate Charts and Captions: A Case Study with Line Charts

Dae Hyun Kim, Vidya Setlur, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM CHI Conference 2021 (Online, May 8-13, 2021) - to appear
PDF

Sentifiers: Interpreting Vague Intent Modifiers in Visual Analysis using Word Co-occurrence and Sentiment Analysis

Vidya Setlur, Arathi Kumar
IEEE Vis - Oct 25-30, 2020
PDF

Sneak Pique: Exploring Autocompletion as a Data Discovery Scaffold for Supporting Visual Analysis

Vidya Setlur, Enamul Hoque, Dae Hyun Kim, Angel X. Chang
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST 2020, New Orleans, LA, USA, October 20-23, 2020.
PDF

Data-driven Intent Models for Visual Analysis Tools and Chatbot Platforms

Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for HCI: A Modern Approach at CHI (April 25, 2020)
PDF

Do What I Mean, Not What I Say! Design Considerations for Supporting Intent and Context in Analytical Conversation

Melanie Tory and Vidya Setlur
IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), October 20-25, 2019
PDF

Toward Interface Defaults for Vague Modifiers in Natural Language Interfaces for Visual Analysis

Marti Hearst, Melanie Tory, Vidya Setlur
IEEE Vis - Oct 20-25, 2019
PDF

ShoCons: Effective Display of Shortcuts in Icon Toolbars

Vidya Setlur, Benjamin Watson
International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications (CHIRA)
PDF

Inferencing Underspecified Natural Language Utterances in Visual Analysis

Vidya Setlur, Melanie Tory, and Alex Djalali
Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2019
PDF

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? Automating the Extraction of Date Scalars

Richard Wesley, Vidya Setlur, Dan Cory
Tableau Research White Paper (TR #2018-01)
PDF

Applying Pragmatics Principles for Interaction with Visual Analytics

Enamul Hoque, Vidya Setlur, Melanie Tory, and Isaac Dykeman
IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), Phoenix, Arizona, USA, October 1-6, 2017
PDF

Exploring Synergies between Visual Analytical Flow and Language Pragmatics

AAAI Spring Symposium on Designing the User Experience of Machine Learning Systems
PDF

Redefining a Contribution for Immersive Visualization Research

Ramik Sadana, Vidya Setlur, John Stasko
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Companion on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces
PDF

Eviza: A Natural Language Interface for Visual Analysis

Vidya Setlur, Sarah E. Battersby, Melanie Tory, Rich Gossweiler, Angel X. Chang
ACM User Interfaces and Software Technology (UIST) 2016
PDF

A Linguistic Approach to Categorical Color Assignment for Data Visualization

Vidya Setlur, Maureen C. Stone
The IEEE Information Visualization Conference (Chicago, October 25-30, 2015)
PDF

GraphTiles: A Visual Interface Supporting Browsing and Imprecise Mobile Search

Juhee Bae, Vidya Setlur, Benjamin Watson
MobileHCI 2015 Conference (Copenhagen, August 25 - 28, 2015)
PDF

Four Experiments on the Perception of Bar Charts

Justin Talbot, Vidya Setlur, Anushka Anand
Infovis 2014, Paris, France
PDF

An Engineering Model for Color Difference as a Function of Size.

Maureen Stone, Danielle Szafir, Vidya Setlur
22nd IS&T Color and Imaging Conference (Boston, November 3-7, 2014)
PDF

Automatic generation of semantic icon encodings for visualizations.

Vidya Setlur, Jock D. Mackinlay
Proceedings ACM CHI’14, April 2014, p.541-550.
PDF
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