Doing Data Science

Chapter 9. Data Visualization and Fraud Detection

There are two contributors for this chapter, Mark Hansen, a professor at Columbia University, and Ian Wong, an inference scientist at Square. (That’s where he was in November 2012 when he came to the class. He now works at Prismatic.) These two speakers and sections don’t share a single cohesive theme between them, although both will discuss data visualization…and both have lived in California! More seriously, both are thoughtful people (like all our contributors) who have thought deeply about themes and questions such as what makes good code, the nature of programming languages as a form of expression, and the central question of this book: what is data science?

Data Visualization History

First up is Mark Hansen, who recently came from UCLA via a sabbatical at the New York Times R & D Lab to Columbia University with a joint appointment in journalism and statistics, where he heads the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. He has a PhD in statistics from Berkeley, and worked at Bell Labs (there’s Bell Labs again!) for several years prior to his appointment at UCLA, where he held an appointment in statistics, with courtesy appointments in electrical engineering and design/media art. He is a renowned data visualization expert and also an energetic and generous speaker. We were lucky to have him on a night where he’d been drinking an XXL latte from Starbucks (we refuse to use their made-up terminology) to highlight his natural effervescence. ...