Large sets of raw data can be overwhelming and difficult to understand without the aid of charts, graphs, and other forms of data visualization. Diverse industries have taken note and are increasingly interested in discovering the stories that can be found within datasets and communicating those findings to their audiences.
At the fifth annual VizUM Symposium at the University of Miami, all things data will be celebrated. The symposium begins with talks from two remarkable thought leaders in the data visualization field, Bongshin Lee, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and Hadley Wickam, chief scientist at RStudio.
“Bongshin and Hadley are leaders in the field. Bongshin is a researcher at Microsoft who has led the design of visualization tools such as Charticulator, and Hadley is, simply put, one of the leaders in the R programming language community, having designed widely used libraries and books such as R for Data Science. Anyone who has used R for a while knows Hadley.” said Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair in Visual Journalism and professor of professional practice.
Following the talk, the winners from the inaugural VizUM Visualization Competition will be announced. The competition challenged designers, journalists, data scientists, statisticians, professionals, and scholars to submit a data visualization essay, story, or infographic based on publicly available data about Miami, or an exploratory data visualization. Finalists’ projects will be showcased and awards will be given for the top data-driven designs. A reception will follow.
The VizUM Symposium is on Thursday, Nov. 15, from 4 – 7 p.m. in the Newman Alumni Center. To attend, register here.
