Wesley Willett

Wesley Willett is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Visual Analytics. His interests span information visualization, social computing, human-computer interaction, and data science, while his research focuses on pairing data and interactivity to support collaboration, learning, and discovery. At Calgary, Dr. Willett leads the Data Experience Lab and is a member of the Interactions Lab, the university’s human-computer interaction research collective. He is also faculty in the University’s Computational Media Design and Data Science programs. Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the Aviz visualization team at Inria in Paris, France. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2012, under the supervision of Dr. Maneesh Agrawala.

Dr. Willett is an expert in data visualization and collaboration, and his research has explored how analysts, enthusiasts, and communities can pool their collective intelligence to solve challenging data-driven problems. He has developed several visualization and data analysis platforms that support the analysis of personal and environmental data. Dr. Willett has also pioneered the use of crowdsourcing to perform high-level data analysis tasks at scale and explored how to extend note-taking and analysis tools to bridge the gap between individual and collaborative data analysis. More recently his work has explored the potential for physical, virtual reality, and augmented reality tools to create new kinds of situated and embedded visualizations uniquely tailored to real-world tasks and environments.