John Alexis
Guerra Gómez
I do Visual Analytics, i.e., I include the user in the big data analysis/science loop.
john.guerra[~at~]gmail.comjohnguerra.co
PDF Version
Follow @duto_guerra
In a nutshell
Information Visualization Researcher and Engineer. I help people extract insights from their data using interactive infovis and data science. PhD in Computer Science, Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University Bay Area. Member of the Khoury Visualization Lab. I conduct research on Visual Analytics, Accessibility, Big data, Human Computer Interaction and Web Development. Formerly at UCBerkeley, Uniandes Colombia, Yahoo Labs, Xerox PARC and DUTO .
Experience
- 10 years as a researcher in Information Visualization. Portfolio
- 17 years as a full stack engineer
- 11 years on teaching at university level
- 30+ research publications at major conferences such as CHI, IEEEVIS, AVI, Assets and TRB.
- Part of the Program Committee of IEEEVIS 2020/21, toCHI 2016, Creativity and Cognition 2017/2018/2019, Graph Drawing 2017. Reviewer for CHI, IEEEVIS, AVI, EuroVis and UIST, and many more.
- 15 years as public speaker, e.g. Openvis2017, TEDx, Singularity University Summit Colombia 2018, Ruta de la Ciencia Colombia 2016, CX Summit Colombia, Halliburton's STEPS Distinguished Lecture series on Big Data in Exploration and Production 2018
- Entrepreneur co-founder of DUTO, KebSolutions, Tweetometro.co and BTactile, with more than 10 international entrepreneurship awards
My Skills
The tools and techniques I use
Experience and Education
08/2020 to Present
Associate Teaching Professor
- Conducting research in information visualization and accesibility.
- Teaching: Web Development, Database Management Systems and Information Visualization.
06/2016 to 06/2020
Assistant Professor (Tenure Track)
- Conducted research in large dataviz, network visualization and photo visualization and accessibility, with the help of great students.
- Redesigned and taught the Visual Analytics (Fall '18, Fall '17, Fall '16) and Web Development classes (Fall '18, Spring '18, Spring '17, Fall '17).
01/2017 to 06/2020
Remote Lecturer and Course Coordinator
- Course co-designer, course coordinator, and remote lecturer at Berkeley's online Master in Data Science. Teaching W209 Data Communication and Visualization.
- Completely redesigned the course materials to include the Visual Analytics theory fundamentals, and D3, Vega-Lite, and Tableau Practice. In collaboration with Andy Reagan
- Published a series of videos on how to go from Visualization theory to practice
- Student projects: Summer 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Summer 2017, Fall 2017.
01/2015 to 04/2016
Postdoctoral Researcher
- Explored information visualization interfaces for navigating big repositories of photos.
- Helped redesign Flickr stats.
- Developed and deployed a visualization for better exploring the organizational units that is being used company wide.
- Modified Flickr code to add a new photo navigation visualization.
- Four papers accepted in two major conferences (CHI2016 and AVI2016).
- Created visual analytics for dozens of complex Yahoo datasets.
05/2013 to 12/2014
Research Scientist
- Created Network Explorer a visual network analytics tool to explore hundreds of thousands of nodes, which was implemented, among others, in a Fraud, Waste and Abuse solution from Xerox and is being used for detecting fraud in Health Care networks.
- Constructed several dashboards using Tableau.
- Developed and integrated several other time-based and text based visualizations in 3 different products.
Inventor, Entrepreneur, Speaker
- Co-founded and developed BTactile a platform to index 5000 tactile graphics for the blind from all over the world using Meteor.js and React.
- OpenVis 2017 Speaker with Untangling the Hairball, slides.
- Creator of open source software: RevealVizScroll, force-in-a-box, netClustering.js, navio.
- Co-creator of tweetometro.co a platform to monitor Twitter activity for the Colombian presidential election.
08/2008 to 04/2013
PhD Student, RA and TA.
- PhD and MSc in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant at the University of Maryland (2013).
- Created the StemView a visualization technique that represents 5 characteristics of change in trees.
- Created the Bullet a visualization glyph that represents 4 characteristics of change in trees.
- Implemented TreeVersity2 a visual analytics web application to explore change in datasets over time.
- Implemented TreeVersity a visual analytics desktop application to compare changes between two trees.
- Conducted 13 case studies with 9 domain experts to validate TreeVersity and TreeVersity2.
01/2005 to 01/2008
Full Time Lecturer
- Winner of the Fulbright Science and Technology scholarship (40 people awarded in the world yearly).
- Lecturer in a wide range of undergrad courses from Programming to Distributed Systems.
06/2003 to 06/2013
Co-founder and CTO
- Co-founder of DUTO and Co-creator of IRIS a system that allows blind students to see with their hands.
- CTO and responsible of all the software development in the company.
- Winner of more than 10 international entrepreneurship awards.
Things I have built
Navio
A visualization widget that you can use to explore large data
BTactile
A search engine for tactile images for the blind.
Tweetometro
Twitter monitor and analyzer for different topics
Phototreemap
Representing groups of photos with numeric attributes. Work in progress, pending publication.
Network Explorer
Visual analytics tool for understanding large networks. Pending publication.
TreeVersity v2
Visualizing five dimensions of change in a dataset changing over time using hierarchies
TreeVersity v1
Comparing changes between trees on structure and node values.
LifeFlow
A visual analytics tool for temporal categorical data. Helped developing the comparison modules as part of a broader project.
IRIS
A system to allow blind children to see colors and shapes with their hands
Academic contributions
Patents and Software
- 2012 Main author Colombian Software Registration 13-34-484 "IRIS version 1.0", registered on October 9th 2012.
- 2011 Main author Colombian Software Registration 13-28-205 "IRIS version 3.0", registered on March 2nd 2011.
- 2007 USA Patent application number 20080174566. System for the perception of images through touch. Registered in April 2006 (Abandoned).
- 2006 International patent registration PCT/IB2006/001502 System for the perception of images with touch. In process with the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) since June 2006.
- 2006 Colombian "IRIS" Trademark registration, class 9 valid from December 22nd 2008 through 2018.
- 2005 Colombian Patent No. 05-037765 "Sistema para la percepción de imágenes por medio del tacto por medio de un guante de imanes" (System for the perception of images by means of touch using a glove of magnets). Resolution 18963 of April 5 2011. Authors: María Fernanda Zúñiga Zabala, John Alexis Guerra Gómez and Felipe Restrepo Calle
Students
Here are my current and past research students.
Classes
Fall 2024
-
Northeastern University Oakland, CS3200: Database Management Systems. Slides 14 Weeks.
Spring 2024
-
Northeastern University Oakland, CS 5010: Program Design Paradigms 14 Weeks.
-
Northeastern University Oakland, CS3200: Database Management Systems 14 Weeks.
Fall 2023
-
Northeastern University Bay Area, CS5200: Database Management Systems 14 Weeks.
Spring 2023
Fall 2022
-
Northeastern University Bay Area, CS 5340 Human Computer Interaction, Fall 2021 14 Weeks.
Spring 2022
-
Northeastern University Bay Area, CS 5010 Program Design Paradigms, Spring 2022 14 Weeks.
Fall 2021
-
Northeastern University Bay Area, CS 5200 Database Management Systems, Fall 2021 14 Weeks.
Summer 2021
-
Northeastern University Bay Area, CS 5200 Database Management Systems, Summer 2021 14 Weeks.
Spring 2021
Fall 2020
Summer 2020
Spring 2020
Fall 2019
Spring 2019
Fall 2018
Summer 2018
Spring 2018
Fall 2017
Summer 2017
Spring 2017
Fall 2016
-
Universidad de los Andes, ISIS 4822 : Visual Analytics 16 Weeks, in cooperation with Jose Tiberio Hernández
Talks and slides
- The quest for Insights, Singularity Summit Colombia Nov. 2018 (Video)
- What is IMAGINE doing on Visual Analytics?, IMAGINE'S 20 years Anniversary Seminar Nov 2018
- Visual analytics perspectives IMAGINE Workshop Summer 2018
- Untangling the hairball Openvisconf 2017
- Analyzing Growth Data in Pre-term Babies VIS2017 Healthcare workshop
- Time based visualizations, Hospital Militar 2017
- Good practices for visual analytics teaching
- Tips for Fulbrighters
- IMAGINE Research agenda
- Research agenda uniandes Summer 2017
- From data to insights: How open data can empower society Condatos2016 talk
- Network Visualization in the real world, lessons learned. IEEEVIS 2016 Talk (Visualization in Practice Workshop)
- The quest for the insights, the true objective of big data
- Network Explorer: Design, Implementation, and Real World Deployment of a Large Network Visualization Tool. AVI2016 presentation
- Identifying Best Practices for Visualizing Photo Statistics and Galleries Using Treemaps. AVI2016 presentation
- La minimentalidad. TEDxPereira, Ruta de la Ciencia 2016.
My Hobby: Photography
I love taking photos, it is my main hobby. I have more than 250k photos to date, so I care about the problem of organizing and navigating photo repositories ;). Here is a sample of my photos on Flickr:
