Keynote

Enrico Bertini
Enrico Bertini, Assistant Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Title:
We Should Never Stop BELIVing: Reflections on 10 Years of Workshops on the Esoteric Art of Evaluating Information Visualization

Summary:
Wow! It has been 10 years since when Catherine, Giuseppe and I started BELIV in 2006! Back then, I was just a fledgling PhD student, with little understanding of what I was doing, but excited by the idea of being able to contribute something new to our community. Not only was visualization a niche topic back then, but its evaluation did not seem to be a major worry in people’s mind. Today, I have way more gray hair and I am even more excited about doing something good for the community. Visualization is now a thriving discipline, sought after and practiced by many, and nobody would ever question the value and need for good and thoughtful evaluation. In this talk, I will try to retrace the path of BELIV: starting from its humble beginnings at AVI in Rome, up to its current glorious status of established and respected academic event people look forward to attend. I will use this opportunity to reflect on how the role and practice of evaluation has changed during the last 10 years: how it was back then, what we have achieved so far, and how it could be in 10 years from now. My talk will include recollections and anecdotes from the past; statistics showing the progress we have made; highlights on BELIV papers that have had a particularly significant impact; and my personal reflections on what we may be able to achieve in the future. Despite the many intricacies and struggles research and evaluation put in front of us, I think our future can be bright. Very bright. But it is up to us to make it happen. We all need to BELIV in it!

Speaker Bio:
Enrico Bertini is Assistant Professor at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research focuses on the study of effective data visualization methods and techniques to explore and make sense of large and often high-dimensional data. He also studies how to communicate complex ideas effectively through visual data presentation. His research has been applied to several application domains including: biochemistry, cybersecurity, development, healthcare, climate science, human rights.

Professor Bertini earned his PhD degree in Computer Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy. Before joining NYU, he was a Research Scientists at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and the University of Konstanz, Germany. He is part of the organizing and program committee of the IEEE VIS conference, the premier conference in the field. In addition, he is one of the founders of the BELIV workshop series on evaluation methods in visualization. He is also the editor of fellinlovewithdata.com and datastori.es, respectively a popular blog and podcast on visualization and data analysis.