The Great Data Visualization Bake Off

(Data Visualization 1 – How to present)
This session is a spinoff of “The Great British Bake Off,” but the participating data scientists are baking data visualizations instead of baking cakes. Data scientists will be given the same ingredients (e.g., datasets and research agenda) in advance to prepare a suite of statistical and visual analytics that answers randomly selected questions of interest. Session participants will serve as judges for the bake off competition. The session will be interactive, giving the audience an opportunity to vote for “best in show” via an online poll.

Target Audience: PSO faculty and staff interested in learning how to utilize a business intelligence platform for generating visual and statistical analytics intended for external and internal stakeholders.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify and understand two stages in the data science pipeline, cleaning and visualizing data, using three well-known business intelligence platforms and data science tools.
• Identify and understand the approaches data scientists use to communicate statistical and visual analytics in a dynamic format.
• Identify and understand how data scientists apply data science concepts and methods to solve problems in real-world contexts and how to communicate those solutions effectively.

Moderator:

James Byars, scientific computing professional specialist, Carl Vinson Institute of Government

James joined the State Services and Decision Support unit at the Institute of Government in 2014 as a graduate research assistant before transitioning into the scientific computing professional specialist position. He currently serves as the interim manager of the Data Analysis and Visualization team and has expertise with data management, visualization, and statistical and computational modeling for projects relating while also providing support on other projects using large statistical and geostatistical datasets.

Presenters:

Emily Franklin, fiscal analyst, Carl Vinson Institute of Government

Emily analyzes the fiscal impact of legislation for the Georgia General Assembly. She also helps governments and its stakeholders form important policy questions with research and data analysis.

Scott King, scientific computing professional specialist, Carl Vinson Institute of Government

Scott joined the Institute of Government in 2019 as a scientific computing professional associate with the State Services and Decision Support Division. Prior to joining the Institute of Government, he worked with Nelnet as a data specialist and consulted as a data scientist with faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Sahar Voghoei, scientific computing professional specialist, Carl Vinson Institute of Government

Sahar joined the Institute of Government in 2021. She has extensive experience in data analysis, statistical modeling, and program and system development. She worked for a decade as a system developer, software analyst, and project manager in Iran before moving to India, where she focused on the automation of semi-manufacturing companies. While pursuing her Ph.D. in computer science at UGA, she worked on a variety of data analysis projects, contributing to many fields such as genetics, education, and massive graph pattern matching.