Dominik Moritz

Last updated in December 2018. Get the latest version at www.domoritz.de/cv.

Ph.D. Candidate
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington, Seattle

https://www.domoritz.de
[email protected]
@domoritz

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.

Education

2015-2019

Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington

Seattle, WA

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

2013-2015

M.S. in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington

Seattle, WA

Advised by Bill Howe and Jeffrey Heer.

2010-2013

B.S. in IT-Systems Engineering, Hasso Plattner Institute

Potsdam, Germany

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

2018

InfoVis Best Paper

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

2016

InfoVis Best Paper

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

2013-2014

Fulbright Fellowship

Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs

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

2013

DAAD Scholarship

German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)

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

2010-2015

Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes

Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, Bonn

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

2013

Hasso Plattner Scholarship

Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam

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

Publications [Interactive Version]

Conference

C11

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

Dominik Moritz, Chenglong Wang, Greg L. Nelson, Halden Lin, Adam M. Smith, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer. InfoVis, 2018.
Best Paper Award

C10

Value-Suppressing Uncertainty Palettes

Michael Correll, Dominik Moritz, Jeffrey Heer. CHI, 2018.

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

Dominik Moritz, Danyel Fisher, Bolin Ding, Chi Wang. CHI, 2017.

Voyager 2: Augmenting Visual Analysis with Partial View Specifications

Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Zening Qu, Dominik Moritz, Riley Chang, Felix Ouk, Anushka Anand, Jock Mackinlay, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer. CHI, 2017.

The Myria Big Data Management and Analytics System and Cloud Service

Jingjing Wang, Tobin Baker, Magdalena Balazinska, Daniel Halperin, Brandon Haynes, Bill Howe, Dylan Hutchison, Shrainik Jain, Ryan Maas, Parmita Mehta, Dominik Moritz, Brandon Myers, Jennifer Ortiz, Dan Suciu, Andrew Whitaker, Shengliang Xu. CIDR, 2017.

Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

Arvind Satyanarayan, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Jeffrey Heer. InfoVis, 2017.
Best Paper Award

SQLShare: Results from a Multi-Year SQL-as-a-Service Experiment

Shrainik Jain, Dominik Moritz, Bill Howe, Ed Lazowska. SIGMOD, 2016.
Most Reproducible Paper Award

High Variety Cloud Databases

Shrainik Jain, Dominik Moritz, Bill Howe. ICDE, 2016.

Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations

Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Dominik Moritz, Anushka Anand, Jock Mackinlay, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer. InfoVis, 2015.
Invited to SIGGRAPH 2016

Perfopticon: Visual Query Analysis for Distributed Databases

Dominik Moritz, Daniel Halperin, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer. Visualization of dataflow and distributed execution in Myria. Influenced the design of the Distributed Dask web interface. EuroVis, 2015.

Visualization of Varying Hierarchies by Stable Layout of Voronoi Treemaps

Sebastian Schmechel, Jonas Trümper, Dominik Moritz, Jürgen Döllner. Publication of algorithms that I developed for my bachelor thesis. International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications (IVAPP), 2014.

Journal

Altair: Interactive Statistical Visualizations for Python

Jacob VanderPlas, Brian E. Granger, Jeffrey Heer, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Arvind Satyanarayan, Eitan Lees, Ilia Timofeev, Ben Welsh, Scott Sievert. The Journal of Open Source Software, 2018.

Text detection in screen images with a Convolutional Neural Network

Dominik Moritz. The Journal of Open Source Software, 2017.

Book Chapter

Advances in Visualization of Big Data

Leilani Battle, Dominik Moritz, Danyel Fisher, Jeffrey Heer. Chapter of the book “Managing Heterogeneous Data and Polystore Databases” edited by Vijay Gadepally, Sam Madden, Michael Stonebraker and to be published by MIT Press. 2019.

Demo

Demonstration of the Myria Big Data Management Service

Daniel Halperin, Victor Teixeira de Almeida, Lee Lee Choo, Shumo Chu, Paraschos Koutris, Dominik Moritz, Jennifer Ortiz, Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk, Jingjing Wang, Andrew Whitaker, Shengliang Xu, Magdalena Balazinska, Bill Howe, Dan Suciu. Demo paper about the Myria system. SIGMOD, 2014.

Workshop

Beyond Heuristics: Learning Visualization Design

Bahador Saket, Dominik Moritz, Halden Lin, Victor Dibia, Çağatay Demiralp, Jeffrey Heer. VisGuides at VIS, 2018.

Extracting Neighborhood Structure from Very Large DNA Graphs

C. Titus Brown, Dominik Moritz, Michael P. O'Brien, Felix Reidl, Blair D. Sullivan. SIAM Workshop on Network Science, 2017.

What Users Don't Expect about Exploratory Data Analysis on Approximate Query Processing Systems

Dominik Moritz, Danyel Fisher. HILDA at SIGMOD, 2017.
Distinguished Long Talk

Lessons from Pangloss: User Encounters with Uncertainty

Dominik Moritz, Danyel Fisher. Designing for Uncertainty in HCI at CHI, 2017.

Towards A General-Purpose Query Language for Visualization Recommendation

Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Dominik Moritz, Anushka Anand, Jock Mackinlay, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer. HILDA at SIGMOD, 2016.

Dynamic Client-Server Optimization for Scalable Interactive Visualization on the Web

Dominik Moritz, Jeffrey Heer, Bill Howe. DSIA at VIS, 2015.

Thesis

Algorithms for the Visualization of Software System Evolution

Dominik Moritz. My bachelor thesis. Not publicly available due to non-disclosure agreement. 2013.

Patents

Mar 2017

Database query for histograms

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Mar 2017

Difference visualization between data sets

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Mar 2017

Fast approximate results and slow precise results

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Professional and Research Experience

2017

Microsoft Research - Research Intern

Redmond

Mentor: Danyel Fisher
In collaboration with the PowerBI team, we developed visualization alternatives that scale to large numbers of records. So far, we have submitted a paper and a patent on part of this project but there is more to come. As a side project, I worked on visualization recommendation using constraints. [Scalable Visualization, PowerBI, Visualization Recommendation]

2016

Microsoft Research - Research Intern

Redmond

Mentors: Danyel Fisher, Bolin Ding, Chi Wang
Developed and user tested a UI for an approximate query processing system. Published a CHI paper, two workshop papers, and filed three patents. [Approximate Query Processing, Visualization, UX]

2015

Google Research - Research Intern

Mountain View

Mentors: Sudip Roy, Alon Halevy, Alkis Polyzotis, Natasha Noy, Xiao Yu, Chris Olston, Sitaram Iyer
Improved the user experience of an internal search engine and designed a summarization algorithm for search results. Also worked with the Knowledge Graph team on exploring a new graph infrastructure that enables integrated applications. [UX, Algorithm design, Large-scale systems, Angular, C++]

2014

Google - Engineering Intern

New York City

Mentors: Ben Atkins, Shishi Chen, John Banning
Developed new algorithms to support complex queries in large-scale production monitoring system. [Algorithm design, Large-scale software development, Profiling, C++]

2012-2013

Open Knowledge Foundation - Intern and Developer

London and Berlin

Mentors: David Raznick, Rufus Pollock, Adrià Mercader, Sean Hammond, Stefan Wehrmeyer
Two-month summer internship and subsequent one-year involvement in development and training for CKAN, the most deployed open data portal in the world. I developed the new data store, a plugin API for CKAN, and a service to automatically ingest data. I also consulted state governments on open data strategies. [Distributed teams, Agile development, Large legacy systems, Python, JavaScript]

2012-2013

Hasso Plattner Institute - Bachelor's Project

Potsdam

In a team of four students developed a tool to visualize software evolution with 3D Voronoi Treemaps. I focused on the theory and implementation of layout algorithms. [Legacy code, Visualization, Complex algorithms, C++]

2012-2013

University of Potsdam - Undergraduate Research Assistant

Potsdam

Mentors: Benjamin Kaufmann, Torsten Schaub, Martin Gebser
Worked on theory and implementation of an extension of the Clasp Answer Set Programming solver for pseudo-boolean constraints. [Research, Benchmarking, Logic programs, C++]

2012

Google Summer of Code

Remote

Extend open data platform for information about people. [Open source development, JavaScript]

Talks [Interactive Version]

Data Visualization with Vega-Lite and Altair for Machine Learning

Dec 2018 TVM Conference, Seattle

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

Oct 2018 IEEE VIS, Berlin

Jul 2018 Microsoft Research, Redmond

Jul 2018 UW Database Affiliates Workshop, Seattle

Automated Visualization Design with Draco

Sep 2018 Tableau Research, Seattle

Aug 2018 Microsoft Excel, Redmond

Declarative Visualization with Vega-Lite and Altair

May 2018 Data Stories Podcast

Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

May 2018 UW ACM Student, Seattle

Dec 2017 Technical University Berlin, Berlin

Nov 2017 DeepMind (Google), London

Nov 2017 City University, London

Nov 2017 Microsoft, Redmond

Jun 2017 Turi (Apple), Seattle

Apr 2017 OpenVis Conf, Boston

Oct 2017 IEEE Infovis, Baltimore

Declarative Visualization Design with Vega-Lite

Jan 2018 Tintash, Lahore

Visualization Grammars

Nov 2017 Dagstuhl Seminar on Connecting Visualization and Data Management Research

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

Jul 2017 Tableau Research, Seattle

Sep 2016 Database Seminar, Microsoft Research, Redmond

May 2016 ACM CHI, San Jose

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

May 2017 HILDA at ACM SIGMOD, Chicago

Vega-Lite: A Declarative Format for Visualization

Nov 2016 Plotcon, New York City

Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations

Jul 2016 SIGGRAPH, Anaheim

Jan 2016 Tableau Research, Seattle

Oct 2015 IEEE Infovis, Chicago

Perfopticon: Visual Query Analysis for Distributed Databases

May 2015 Eurovis, Cagliari

Teaching Experience

2018

Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

OpenVis Conf Workshop

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

2017

HCID 520: User Interface Software & Technology

University of Washington

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

2015

CSE 512: Data Visualization

University of Washington

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

2017

Vega-Lite Workshop

San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD

2016

Vega-Lite Workshop

UC Davis

2014

SQL Workshop

UW eScience Institute

One day workshop for scientists as part of Software Carpentry workshop series.

2012

VHDL

Hasso Plattner Institute

Prepared course material for class on VHSIC Hardware Description Language.

Mentoring Experience

2018

Google Summer of Code

University of Washington

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.

Mentored:

Yash Dev Lamba,
Souvik Sen

2017-2018

CSE Mentoring Program

University of Washington

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.

Mentored:

Yasaman Sefidgar,
Rashmi Mudduluru,
Qisheng Li

2015-2019

Mentor Undergraduate Researchers

University of Washington

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

Mentored:

Zening Qu (now Ph.D. student at UW iSchool),
Youying Lin (now at Google),
Ayush Saraf,
Zoe "Zoe" Lu (now at Facebook),
Will Strimling (now PM at Twitter),
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

2017

Dubhacks Mentor and Judge

University of Washington

2016

Dubhacks Mentor and Judge

University of Washington

2016

Hack HPI Mentor and Judge

Hasso Plattner Institute

2012

Preparation for Programming Competition

Hasso Plattner Institute

One day preparation training high school students for programming competition.

2009-2010

Math Club for Elementary School Students

Marie Curie Gymnasium

Led a math club for local elementary school students.

Service

Reviewer for ACM CHI, IEEE VIS, TVCG, Eurovis, Pacificvis, HILDA, and DSIA. Program committee for HILDA 2018. Organizer of DSIA 2018.
Member of the Frictionless Data working group that aims to submit a specification to the IETF.

Relevant Coursework

University of Washington

Distributed Systems (Tom Anderson)
Data Visualization (Jeffrey Heer)
Programming Languages (Zach Tatlock)
Databases (Magdalena Balazinska)
Computer Vision (Ali Farhadi)
Machine Learning (Sham Kakade)
Statistical Methods for Machine Learning (Pedro Domingos)
Constraint Programming (Alan Borning)
User Studies (Mike Ernst)

University of Potsdam

Declarative Problem Solving
Applied Logic
Artificial Intelligence

Hasso Plattner Institute

Databases I and II
Designing Interactive Systems
Computer Graphics
Software Engineering
Operating Systems
Computational Geometry

References

Jeffrey Heer
Professor of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
[email protected]

Bill Howe
Professor at the Information School
University of Washington
[email protected]

Danyel Fisher
Principal Design Researcher
Honeycomb
Former Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research
[email protected]

Tim Kraska
Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[email protected]

Steven Franconeri
Professor of Psychology
Northwestern University
[email protected]