Study leads to a system that lets people use simple English to create complex machine learning-driven visualizations

The ubiquity and sheer volume of data generated today give experts in virtually every domain ample information to track everything from financial trends, disaster evacuation routes, and street traffic, to animal migrations, weather patterns, and disease vectors. But using this data to build visualizations of complex predictive models using machine learning is a challenge to experts who lack the requisite computer science skills. A team at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering's Visualization and Data Analytics (VIDA) lab, led by Claudio Silva, professor in the department of computer science and engineering, developed a framework called VisFlow, by which those who may not be experts in machine learning can create highly flexible data visualizations from almost any data. Furthermore, the team made it easier and more intuitive to edit these models by developing an extension of VisFlow called FlowSense, which allows users to synthesize data exploration pipelines through a natural language interface. The research, "FlowSense: A Natural Language Interface for Visual Data Exploration with a Dataflow System" won the best-paper award at this year's IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST).