Coffee & Viz: Understanding Color for Data Visualization

Dr. Christopher Healey’s work harnesses visual perception to create visualization techniques supporting the rapid and effective exploration and analysis of large, complex datasets. Color is a familiar concept that we all recognize and use in our day-to-day lives. Understanding how color 'works' is a much more fascinating problem, however, involving the physics of light, visual perception, language and culture, and context. This talk will touch on these issues by discussing them and demonstrating how they affect presenting data with color. Dr. Healey will also discuss some ongoing projects, including the extensive COVID-19 dashboard. 

Christopher G. Healey is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, and the Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Analytics at the Institute for Advanced Analytics. He received a B.Math from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. His research interests include visualization, graphics, visual perception, and areas of applied mathematics, machine learning, natural language processing, and aesthetics related to visual analysis and data management.