On June 4, Professor Brice Ménard from Johns Hopkins University presented How Do You Want Your Data: Hot or Cold? to an audience of about 70.
Ménard posited that, as time goes on, our interaction with large datasets tends to be more involved and less intuitive. Most datasets can no longer be visualized in their entirety and we have to interact with them mathematically, making blind data exploration challenging. In his talk, Ménard presented some theoretical considerations of data analysis and data complexity, and showed that performing a “cooling” operation on data can automatically reveal the inherent structure of a dataset and the properties of its underlying population. He then presented a new tool, the Sequencer, which can generically perform such a cooling operation on arbitrary datasets. He showed that it provides a new way to explore complex datasets and restore visual insight.
Stay tuned for more CIERA Interdisciplinary Colloquia.