First day of school! Today I'm starting as a professor at Harvard. My research will center on visualization, human/AI interaction, and how we can use computers to generate insight.
Martin Wattenberg
733 posts
Martin Wattenberg
@wattenberg
Human/AI interaction. Visualization as design, science, art. Professor at Harvard, and part-time at Google's People+AI Research initiative.
Joined July 2008
- How does a neural net represent language? See the visualizations and geometry in this PAIR team paper arxiv.org/abs/1906.02715 and blog post pair-code.github.io/interpretabili…
- Tiny neural networks have a surprisingly rich inner life, and may hold clues to how their larger cousins work. This image: evolution of feature vectors during learning. Full story: transformer-circuits.pub/2022/toy_model… (in collaboration with the great interpretability team at @AnthopicAI)
- PAIR's new "What-If Tool" lets you probe a machine learning model, no extra coding required! Visualize inference, find counterfactuals, see feature importance, try algorithmic fairness criteria. Now in TensorBoard! @bengiswex @mahimapushkarna Jimbo Wilson ai.googleblog.com/2018/09/the-wh…
GIF - Visualize transformer attention! AttentionViz, created by Catherine Yeh and expanded by Yida Chen, helps you explore transformer self-attention by visualizing query and key vectors in a joint embedding. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2305.03210 Website: attentionviz.com
- t-SNE seems to magically map high-dimensional data. How to read those maps correctly: distill.pub/2016/misread-t… (with @viegas, @enjalot)
- Histogram of (mostly) rocks found on a Wellfleet beach. Happy August!
- I’m excited to announce that starting in fall 2021 I’ll be a professor of computer science at Harvard (and affiliated with the business school). And yes, @viegasf will join me in spring 2022! We’ll also continue to work part-time at Google and on PAIR.
- Paths in polygonal billiards: image made after reading work of Iranian-American mathematician (and Fields medalist) Maryam Mirzakhani.
- Thinking about grad school next year? Interested in visualization, human/AI interaction, or computational art? Consider Harvard! @viegasf and I are building up our lab and will be looking for students. Our DMs are open.
- Visualizing simple machine learning systems... and ways they can be fair or unfair. Essay with @viegasf and @mrtz research.google.com/bigpicture/att…
GIF - Does this @WSJGraphics chart downplay US concern over Russian hacking? Here's a redesign for comparison. wsj.com/articles/poll-…
- This simple math model is so surprising I wrote code to verify for myself (pic). nautil.us/issue/23/domin…
- When @viegasf and I designed our wind map, we scaled the brightness by the top windspeed in the data. We also only plot wind over land. So when a hurricane is heading to landfall, the map goes ominously, unreadably dark. Technical bug, emotional feature. hint.fm/wind
