Saugat

This experience has been the main reason behind my interest in leveraging multi-agent systems for user tasks and helping users perceive data or enhance storytelling through data visualization.

Community Intern Captain Highlight: One of my proudest achievements was serving as the Community Intern Captain alongside two other incredible interns for the Seattle Office. We organized multiple outdoor events including:

• ⚾ Baseball game experiences
• 🏔️ Hiking adventures at Mount Rainier
• 🏞️ Picnic at the Park gatherings

This leadership role helped me connect with people from different research areas, discover synergies, and brainstorm how we can leverage vision and AI tasks in the context of visualization.

How I got it: I reached out to Jane in early November when I was working on my thesis and brainstorming project ideas. During our conversation, I pitched my research interests and discovered they were exploring something similar! This is a perfect example of how cold emailing and clearly explaining your research interests can lead to amazing opportunities. 🚀

Primary Project: I performed comprehensive statistical analysis across different factors including race, access to internet, access to technology both at school and home, and other social and demographic factors. This work directly connected to my research interests in understanding how different populations interact with and interpret data visualizations.

Secondary Environmental Project: I got involved in an amazing secondary project with Rachel Carroll, who became a great mentor (she even extended my internship!). We investigated environmental factors on student performance, where I helped perform ML and regression models on environmental factors to predict air pollution in regions across North Carolina.

Technical Contributions:

• 🔍 Pulled data from Purple Air using the Purple API across different locations in North Carolina
• 📊 Worked with EPA data for comprehensive environmental analysis
• 🗺️ Explored kriging methods and clustering techniques to predict air pollutant levels
• 📈 Investigated relationships between environmental factors and student performance

This work is currently under submission at Nature Scientific Reports! 🚀

How I got it: I was particularly interested in working at an organization that investigates student performance on assessments, especially given my work on visualization literacy - exploring whether people can read and interpret data visualizations. I looked around for such organizations and found out there are many organizations, particularly in the Washington DC area, working with the Department of Education or other agencies to investigate student performance on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments. The connection between assessment performance and data interpretation abilities made this opportunity perfect for my research interests!

So, I decided to go with PhD and chose WashU. I was always intrigued by the usage of visualizations in sports games (like cricket, badminton, football) growing up and also noticed how poorly designed visualizations were proliferating in news media and social media platforms. My dad would share them without knowing what the chart was saying or without noticing the irregularity. This pushed me to pursue PhD in visualization or human-computer interaction.

Finding My Mentor: Prof. Alvitta Ottley was actively working on information visualization and how we can use them to communicate data to different stakeholders. When I was rotating with her, she gave me a project about creating a test to measure whether people can actually read or interpret data visualizations. This was right in my interest and league of why I started PhD!

The Mini-VLAT Project: I took the project without even giving it a second thought and not exactly knowing what it would entail. Little did I know it would involve everything from literature review to user studies to coming back and iterating on experimental issues to writing a paper and getting my first first-author best paper award at a premier visualization conference, EuroVIS! 🏆

Germany & Conference Glory: Getting the opportunity to travel to Germany to present and being the first one to present in front of the whole conference audience (yes, best paper award gets to present in front of whole crowd instead of small session) was incredible. This was the beginning of my PhD journey.

But it wasn't a straight path... Much like a complex data visualization with multiple axes and unexpected patterns, my PhD journey had its own twists, turns, and fascinating discoveries that I never anticipated. Like a scatter plot that reveals hidden correlations, each challenge revealed new insights about research, visualization, and myself. I will add more about my journey afterwards... 📊✨