Dominik Moritz

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Professor at CMU HCII and Research Manager at Apple.

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

2020–present Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA
Assistant Professor, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Data Interaction Group
2019–present Apple Seattle, WA and Pittsburgh, PA
Research Scientist, AIML visualization team
2019 Streamlit San Francisco, CA
Researcher, developed caching and visualization
2013–2019 University of Washington Seattle, WA
Research Assistant, Interactive Data Lab and UW Database Group
2017 Microsoft Research Redmond, WA
Research Intern, mentored by Danyel Fisher working with PowerBI team
2016 Microsoft Research Redmond, WA
Research Intern, mentored by Danyel Fisher working with database research team
2015 Google Research Mountain View, CA
Research Intern, Structured Data research team
2014 Google New York City, NY
Engineering Intern, Monarch monitoring system team
2012–2013 Open Knowledge Foundation London and Berlin
Intern and Developer, datastore, previews, automatic data ingestion
2012–2013 Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam
Bachelor's Project

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 Visualization & 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

2024 Visualization Significant New Researcher Award

For impactful work in the development of software infrastructure that has influenced both research and practice.

2024 ACM CHI Best Paper Honorable Mention Award

2023 IEEE VIS Best Paper Honorable Mentions

Three awards for two full and one short paper.

2022 ACM CHI Best Paper Award

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

2020 IEEE VGTC Outstanding Dissertation Award

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

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

C46
Opening the Black Box of 3D Reconstruction Error Analysis with VECTOR
Racquel Fygenson, Kazi Jawad, Zongzhan Li, Francois Ayoub, Robert G Deen, Scott Davidoff, Dominik Moritz, Mauricio Hess-Flores. VIS, 2024.
C45
Talaria: Interactively Optimizing Machine Learning Models for Efficient Inference
Fred Hohman, Chaoqun Wang, Jinmook Lee, Jochen Görtler, Dominik Moritz, Jeffrey P Bigham, Zhile Ren, Cecile Foret, Qi Shan, Xiaoyi Zhang. CHI, 2024. Best Paper Honorable Mention
C44
Exploring The Affordances of Game-Aware Streaming to Support Blind and Low Vision Viewers: A Design Probe Study
Noor Hammad, Frank Elavsky, Sanika Moharana, Jessie Chen, Seyoung Lee, Patrick Carrington, Dominik Moritz, Jessica Hammer, Erik Harpstead. ASSETS, 2024.
C39
VegaProf: Profiling Vega Visualizations
Junran Yang, Alex Bäuerle, Dominik Moritz, Çağatay Demiralp. UIST, 2023.
C34
Combining Degree of Interest Functions and Progressive Visualization
Marius Hogräfer, Dominik Moritz, Adam Perer, Hans-Jörg Schulz. VIS, 2023.
C33
Designing Data: Proactive Data Collection and Iteration for Machine Learning Using Reflexive Planning, Monitoring, and Density Estimation
Aspen Hopkins, Fred Hohman, Luca Zappella, Xavier Suau Cuadros, Dominik Moritz. Artificial Intelligence & Human-Computer Interaction Workshop at ICML, 2023.
C27
Leveraging Analysis History for Improved In Situ Visualization Recommendation
Will Epperson, Doris Jung-Lin Lee, Leijie Wang, Kunal Agarwal, Aditya Parameswaran, Dominik Moritz, Adam Perer. EuroVis, 2022.
C26
Network Report: A Structured Description for Network Datasets
Carol (Xinyi) Zheng, Ryan A. Rossi, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Dominik Moritz. CIKM, 2022.
C24
DuckDB-Wasm: Fast Analytical Processing for the Web
André Kohn, Dominik Moritz, Mark Raasveldt, Hannes Mühleisen, Thomas Neumann. VLDB, 2022.
C23
Studying Early Decision Making with Progressive Bar Charts
Ameya Patil, Gaëlle Richer, Christopher Jermaine, Dominik Moritz, Jean-Daniel Fekete. VIS, 2022.
C13
Database Benchmarking for Supporting Real-Time Interactive Querying of Large Data
Leilani Battle, Philipp Eichmann, Marco Angelini, Tiziana Catarci, Giuseppe Santucci, Yukun Zheng, Carsten Binnig, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Dominik Moritz. SIGMOD, 2020.
C6
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.
C2
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.
C1
Visualization of Varying Hierarchies by Stable Layout of Voronoi Treemaps
Sebastian Schmechel, Jonas Trümper, Dominik Moritz, Jürgen Döllner. Publication of algorithms that Dominik developed for my bachelor thesis. International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications (IVAPP), 2014.

Journal

J3
AI4VIS: Survey on Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Data Visualization
Aoyu Wu, Yun Wang, Xinhuan Shu, Dominik Moritz, Weiwei Cui, Haidong Zhang, Dongmei Zhang, Huamin Qu. TVCG, 2021.
J2
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.

Book Chapter

B1
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

D1
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

W5
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.

Thesis

T1
Algorithms for the Visualization of Software System Evolution
Dominik Moritz. My bachelor thesis. Not publicly available due to non-disclosure agreement. 2013.

Patents

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Student Mentoring

2023–present

Hwei-Shin Harriman

CMU

PhD Student. Co-advised with Josh Sunshine.

2021–present

Frank Elavsky

CMU

PhD Student. Co-advised with Patrick Carrington.

2020–present

Will Epperson

CMU

PhD Student. Co-advised with Adam Perer.

2020–2022

Carol Xinyi Zheng

CMU

PhD Student.

2020

Mary Beth Kery

CMU

Thesis Commitee.

2020–2021

Kai Ye

CMU

Thesis Commitee.

2023

Tomas Cabezon Pedroso

CMU

Thesis Commitee.

2023

Jeffrey Tao

Columbia University

Thesis Commitee.

2024

Yanna Lin

CMU

Visiting Researcher.

2023

Karim Benharrak

CMU

Visiting Researcher. Co-advised with David Lindlbauer.

2022–2024

Péter Gyarmati

CMU

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

2022–2024

Junran Yang

CMU

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

2022–2023

Zehua Zeng

CMU

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

2022–2023

Donny Bertucci

CMU

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

2020–2024

Lukas Hermann

CMU

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

2024

Apple Summer Internship

Apple
2023

Apple Summer Internship

Apple
2022

Apple Summer Internship

Apple

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

2021

Apple Summer Internship

Apple

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

2020

Apple Summer Internship

Apple

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

2023

Research Assistants

CMU
2021

Research Assistants

CMU
2020

Research Assistants

CMU
2019–2020

Hung Ngo

Vega

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.

2019

Google Summer of Code

University of Washington

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.

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.

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.

2015–2019

Undergraduate Researchers

University of Washington

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

Talks [Interactive Version]

Mosaic, An Architecture for Scalable & Interoperable Data Views (Dominik's Version)

Harvard Medical School
Princeton HCI Seminar
Khoury Database Seminar at Northeastern University

Data Visualization for the Resistance

William Pierson Field Lecture at Princeton

Data Visualization for the Resistance; The value of visualization and ethical considerations around data

William Pierson Lecture at Princeton

The Future of Data Science is Live and in the Browser

Visualization Design Lab at The University of Utah
Brown Institue at Columbia University

DuckDB & Mosaic : Interactive Insights on Large datasets

Quack&Code

Vega: Layered Abstractions for Data Visualizations

Plateau Keynote
Turing Institute Visualization Interest Group

Scalable Interactive Systems for Visualization and Analysis

TU Darmstadt
Sigma Computing

Apache Arrow on the Web and Beyond

Thread Conference

Hello Swift Charts

WWDC 2022

Enhancing Decision-Making through Interactive Data Analysis

CMU ENAiBLE

Declarative and Scalable Visualization Design

Robust AI Meetup, Zoom

Visualization for People + Systems

GAMES Webinar, Online
MIT, Boston
Google, Boston
Tableau, Seattle
Northwestern, Evanston
University of Chicago, Chicago
University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver
University of Wisconsin, Madison
New York University (NYU), New York
Microsoft Research, Redmond
Apple (Turi), Seattle
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh
University of California (UCSD), San Diego
University of Toronto, Toronto
University of Illinois (UIUC), Urbana-Champaign
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Declarative Visualization Design with Vega-Lite and Altair

Open Data Science Conference West (ODSC), San Francisco

Altair: Declarative Visualization in Python

Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS), Bellevue

Raising the Abstraction of Data Visualization

IBM Research, Bangalore

Data Visualization with Vega-Lite and Altair for Machine Learning

TVM Conference, Seattle

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

IEEE VIS, Berlin
Microsoft Research, Redmond
UW Database Affiliates Workshop, Seattle

Automated Visualization Design with Draco

Tableau Research, Seattle
Microsoft Excel, Redmond

Declarative Visualization with Vega-Lite and Altair

Data Stories Podcast

Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

UW ACM Student, Seattle
Technical University Berlin, Berlin
DeepMind (Google), London
City University, London
Microsoft, Redmond
IEEE Infovis, Baltimore
Turi (Apple), Seattle
OpenVis Conf, Boston

Declarative Visualization Design with Vega-Lite

Tintash, Lahore

Visualization Grammars

Dagstuhl Seminar on Connecting Visualization and Data Management Research

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

Tableau Research, Seattle
Database Seminar, Microsoft Research, Redmond
ACM CHI, San Jose

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

HILDA at ACM SIGMOD, Chicago

Vega-Lite: A Declarative Format for Visualization

Plotcon, New York City

Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations

SIGGRAPH, Anaheim
Tableau Research, Seattle
IEEE Infovis, Chicago

Perfopticon: Visual Query Analysis for Distributed Databases

Eurovis, Cagliari

Teaching

2024 Programming Usable Interfaces (PUI) Carnegie Mellon University

Instructor, 65 students

2022 Data Visualization Carnegie Mellon University

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

2021 Data Visualization Carnegie Mellon University

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

2020 Interactive Data Science Carnegie Mellon University

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

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

Instructor, 20 participants
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.

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.