Leland Wilkinson, H2O.ai - The Grammar of Graphics and the Future of Big Data Visualization

#H2OWorld

This session was recorded in NYC on October 22nd, 2019.

Slides from the session can be viewed here: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/rKt...

The Grammar of Graphics and the Future of Big Data Visualization
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the first edition of The Grammar of Graphics (GG). The book laid the foundation for a major visualization component at the statistical software company SPSS. Since that edition, a commercial company, Tableau, evolved from a Stanford seminar and dissertation devoted to the book. Not long after, the widely used open-source visualization package, ggplot2, arose from a dissertation at Iowa State University. GG not only provided for the first time a formal mathematical foundation for generating statistical charts, but also introduced a wider range of graphics than seen in previous graphical systems. This talk will briefly review that history and then outline recent efforts at H2O to apply GG to very large datasets where classical rendering and analytic methods are infeasible.

Bio: Leland Wilkinson is Chief Scientist at H2O and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard in 1966, an S.T.B. degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1969, and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1975. Wilkinson wrote the SYSTAT statistical package and founded SYSTAT Inc. in 1984. After the company grew to 50 employees, he sold SYSTAT to SPSS in 1994 and worked there for ten years on research and development of visualization systems. Wilkinson subsequently worked at Skytree and Tableau before joining H2O.

Wilkinson is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has won best speaker award at the National Computer Graphics Association and the Youden prize for best expository paper in the statistics journal Technometrics. He has served on the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Research Council and is a member of the Boards of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). In addition to authoring journal articles, the original SYSTAT computer program and manuals, and patents in visualization and distributed analytic computing, Wilkinson is the author (with Grant Blank and Chris Gruber) of Desktop Data Analysis with SYSTAT. He is also the author of The Grammar of Graphics, the foundation for several commercial and open­source visualization systems (IBM­RAVE, Tableau, R­ggplot2, and Python­Bokeh).