Dominik Moritz

Research Area

To enhance people's ability to understand and communicate large and complex data, I develop methods that richly integrate the capabilities of both people and machines. I combine methods from visualization, data management, programming languages, and human-computer interaction to enable effective methods for data analysis and communication. My systems have won awards at premier academic venues, and are used by journalists, data enthusiasts, developers, educators, and the data science community.

Positions

Education

Advised by Jeffrey Heer and Bill Howe.
Thesis: “Interactive Systems for Scalable Visualization & Analysis”.
Member of the Interactive Data Lab and Database Group.

Advised by Bill Howe and Jeffrey Heer.

Thesis: “Algorithms for the Visualization of Software System Evolution”.
GPA: 4.0 (1.0 in German system), highest distinction, rank 1/74
Advanced classes on database implementation, computational geometry, architecture, and logic.

Notable Awards

Three awards for two full and one short paper.

For "Neo: Generalizing Confusion Matrix Visualization to Hierarchical and Multi-Output Labels".

For my thesis on "Interactive Systems for Scalable Visualization and Analysis".

For "Formalizing Visualization Design Knowledge as Constraints: Actionable and Extensible Models in Draco".

For "Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics".

Highly competitive, merit-based grant for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers and scientists.

Scholarship to study at a North American university for one academic year, covering tuition and living expenses.

The German National Academic Foundation grants prestigious scholarships to students with outstanding academic achievements. Merit-based grant for B.S. and M.S. studies.

One-year scholarship awarded to the highest performing graduates of each year.

Publications [Interactive Version]

Conference

Journal

Book Chapter

Demo

Workshop

Thesis

Patents

Student Mentoring

PhD Student. Co-advised with Josh Sunshine.

PhD Student. Co-advised with Patrick Carrington.

PhD Student. Co-advised with Adam Perer.

PhD Student.

Thesis Commitee.

Thesis Commitee.

Thesis Commitee.

Thesis Commitee.

Visiting Researcher.

Visiting Researcher. Co-advised with David Lindlbauer.

Research Collaborator. Peter was at the University of Vienna. We worked on Draco2.

Research Collaborator. Junran was at the University of Washington. We worked on Draco2, scalable visualization, and debugging visualizations.

Research Collaborator. Zehua was at the University of Maryland. We worked on Draco2.

Research Collaborator. Donny was at Oregon State and we worked together on Falcon.

Research Collaborator. Lukas and I worked together on Vega visualizations. He now works at Databricks.

• Angie Boggust
• Venkatesh Sivaraman

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

• Samantha Robertson
• Zijie J. Wang

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

• Alex Bäuerle
• Ángel Alexander Cabrera

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

• Aspen Hopkins
• Jochen Görtler
• Stephon Fonrose

• Syeda Sheherbano Rizvi
• Lan Lyu
• Fernie Qin

• Yiwei Wu
• Canzhou Qu

• Harshil Rastogi
• Leila Huang
• Sujun Cheng
• Shreya Manjunath
• Shreya Bahl

Research Collaborator. Hung worked with me on a renderer service for Vega-Lite and Vega visualizations. He integrated the renderer into the popular Vega online editor.

The IDL was selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2019. I mentored two students from India to work on the Vega editor.

• Aman Sharma
• Siddhant Manchanda

The IDL was selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2018. Together with Kanit "Ham" Wongsuphasawat I mentored two students from India to work on Vega-Lite.

• Yash Dev Lamba
• Souvik Sen

Together with Sarah Chasins, I mentored a group of first-year students for over a year. Sarah and I gave advice on finding classes, research projects, collaborators, and advisors, as well as managing conferences.

• Yasaman Sefidgar
• Rashmi Mudduluru
• Qisheng Li

Mentor students for working on Vega-Lite, Voyager, Polestar, and related projects.

• Zening Qu
• Youying Lin
• Ayush Saraf
• Zoe "Zoe" Lu
• Will Strimling
• Swojit Mohapatra
• Lingyue "Cynthia" Zhang
• Tianyi Lin
• Matthew Chun
• Felix Ouk
• Sira Horradarn
• Chanwut "Mick" Kittivorawong
• Ishan Saksena
• Akshat Shrivastava
• Halden Lin
• Melissa Diamond
• Saba Noorassa

Talks [Interactive Version]

The Future of Data Science is Live and in the Browser

DuckDB & Mosaic : Interactive Insights on Large datasets

Vega: Layered Abstractions for Data Visualizations

Scalable Interactive Systems for Visualization and Analysis

Apache Arrow on the Web and Beyond

Hello Swift Charts

Enhancing Decision-Making through Interactive Data Analysis

Declarative and Scalable Visualization Design

Visualization for People + Systems

Declarative Visualization Design with Vega-Lite and Altair

Altair: Declarative Visualization in Python

Raising the Abstraction of Data Visualization

Data Visualization with Vega-Lite and Altair for Machine Learning

Formalizing Visualization Design Knowledge as Constraints: Actionable and Extensible Models in Draco

Automated Visualization Design with Draco

Declarative Visualization with Vega-Lite and Altair

Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

Declarative Visualization Design with Vega-Lite

Visualization Grammars

Trust, but Verify: Optimistic Visualizations of Approximate Queries for Exploring Big Data

What Users Don't Expect about Exploratory Data Analysis on AQP Systems

Vega-Lite: A Declarative Format for Visualization

Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations

Perfopticon: Visual Query Analysis for Distributed Databases

Teaching

Instructor, 50 students
Prepared and taught lectures. Prepared and graded assignments.

Instructor, 35 students
Prepared and taught lectures. Prepared and graded assignments. Co-taught with Adam Perer.

Instructor, 75 students
Prepared and taught lectures. Prepared and graded assignments. Co-taught with Adam Perer.

Prepared and presented 3.5 hour tutorial at OpenVis Conf in Paris.

Teaching Assistant for Jeffrey Heer, 30 students
Presented sesssions, updated assignments, graded, held office hours.

Teaching Assistant for Jeffrey Heer, 80 students
Developed and presented tutorials on visualization tools, CSS, and D3. Graded assignments, held office hours.

Instructor, 20 participants
One day workshop for scientists as part of Software Carpentry workshop series.

Prepared course material for class on VHSIC Hardware Description Language.

Service

Reviewer for ACM CHI, IEEE VIS, TVCG, EuroVis, PacificVis, Computers & Graphics, HILDA, and DSIA. Program committee for HILDA 2018, HILDA 2019, and HILDA 2020, and program chair for HILDA 2022 and HILDA 2023 at SIGMOD. Organizer of DSIA 2018 and DSIA 2019 at VIS. Session chair at CHI 2019, VIS 2019, VIS 2020, VIS 2021, VIS 2023. Program committee at VIS 2020 and 2021. Organizing committee for VIS 2022, VIS 2023, VIS 2024. Maintainer of many open source projects. Apache Arrow committer.