5 takes from IBM's Mauro Martino talk on AI and data viz

Northeastern University professor Mauro Martino is one of the minds behind IBM's Watson News Explorer, a dashboard that allows users to explore the themes surfacing across the news ecosystem. Martino spoke last week at NUVis, Northeastern's Visualization Consortium seminar series, about his work with artificial intelligence -- or machine learning, as he prefers to call it -- and visualization as a path to "accelerate human knowledge." An award-winning design artist and director at the Cognitive Visualization Lab at IBM, Martino shared many insights on how journalists and other professionals can offer more meaningful storytelling by marrying data visualization and artificial intelligence. Martino's research focuses on how information technology relates to exploration and the dissemination of knowledge. Through artificial intelligence and data visualization, he believes people can expand the reality in front of them with complex classification and connections that emerge from computer analysis.