Abstract : Data-workers are domain experts who work extensively with data, but who are not formal data scientists.  In this talk, I present a study of data-workers’ practices around uncertainty in data.  We conducted interviews with twelve participants from diverse fields, from bio-informaticiens to surgeons, historians, or project managers, about how they think about, manage, or understand their data in the face of uncertainty.  We will explore the various coping strategies that participants employed to understand, minimise, exploit, or even ignore this uncertainty.  Based on these observations, we propose a new process model of how people analyse various types of uncertain data.  Finally, I also present the Visualization & Advanced Interaction (VIA) group at Télécom ParisTech and an overview of some of our other work on enriching users’ interactions with software.

This work was conducted in collaboration with Nadia Boukhelifa, Samuel Huron, and Marc-Emmanuel Perrin.

Bio :  James Eagan is an associate professor in the VIA group at Télécom ParisTech and the LTCI research lab.  His research focuses on the computer as a tool for exploring, manipulating, and understanding data.  It is oriented around three primary themes: 1) Data visualization to help users better make sense rich and complex information, 2) interfaces to enrich the expressivity of their interactions, and 3) malleable toolkits to help programmers better express such interactions in ways that are appropriable and adaptable by end users.