I am a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science, and the Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Analytics in the Institute for Advanced Analytics, both located at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. My research focuses on investigating visualization techniques that support rapid, accurate, and effective exploration and analysis of large, complex, multivariate datasets. Many of our approaches harness visual perception. This allows much of the analysis to be performed automatically by the low-level visual system. More recently, I have been investigating machine learning for natural language processing and text analytics.
Recent Projects
We have published election results for the 2022 election cycle, including winners by Congression district for the most recent Presidential, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Gubernatorial races. The visualization includes incumbent losses, new 2020 Congression district and statewide results, and a visual representation of the number of electoral college votes now controlled by each state.
We have recently updated our web application for visualizing social media sentiment. Recent social media posts are requested based on user-chosen keywords. An estimate of each post's sentiment is made from its text. The results are visualized in numerous ways: in an emotional scatterplot with horizontal pleasure and vertical arousal axes, clustered by topic, in a heatmap that counts tweets by sentiment bins, as a tag cloud of frequent terms, as a timeline of when posts were posted, and as a list of posts and their associated sentiment measurements.