Vidya Setlur

Vidya Setlur is the director of Tableau Research. She leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists in areas including data visualization, multimodal interaction, statistics, applied ML, and NLP. She earned her doctorate in Computer Graphics in 2005 at Northwestern University. Prior to joining Tableau, she worked as a principal research scientist at the Nokia Research Center for seven years. Her personal research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing and information visualization to better understand data semantics and user intent to inform the meaningful visual depiction of data. She recently co-authored a book titled Functional Aesthetics for Data Visualization.