Fan Du

I am a Research Director at Dolby Laboratories. I work on developing human-centered AI systems that empower domain practitioners with visual, interactive, and intelligent technologies. Previously, I have worked at Adobe Research and Databricks.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2018, advised by Dr. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant. I earned my bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University, Chu Kochen Honors Program in 2013.

Contact:     |  Google Scholar |       

Software: EventFlow |  EventAction |  PeerFinder |  CoCo

 

Featured Projects (all)

Industrial Applications for Digital Marketing

A Visual Analytics Approach for Exploratory Causal Analysis:
Exploration, Validation, and Applications
Xiao Xie ( summer intern), Fan Du, Yingcai Wu
TVCG | VAST IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2020.
Download: [pdf] [virtual presentation]

 

Real-Time Clustering for Large Sparse Online Visitor Data
Gromit Chan ( summer intern), Fan Du, Ryan Rossi, Anup Rao, Eunyee Koh, Claudio Silva, Juliana Freire
WWW Proceedings of The Web Conference, 2020.
Download: [pdf] | Oral Presentation

 

Visualizing Uncertainty and Alternatives in Event Sequence Predictions
Shunan Guo ( summer intern), Fan Du, Sana Malik, Eunyee Koh, Sungchul Kim
Zhicheng Liu, Donghyun Kim, Hongyuan Zha, Nan Cao
CHI Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019.
Download: [pdf] [system] | Sneaks Demo @ Adobe Summit | Forbes News

 

Temporal Data Analysis

EventAction: A Visual Analytics Approach to Explainable
Recommendation for Event Sequences
Fan Du, Catherine Plaisant, Neil Spring, Kenyon Crowley, Ben Shneiderman
TiiS ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 2019.
Download: [pdf] | TiiS Best Paper Award

 

Finding Similar People to Guide Life Choices: Challenge, Design, and Evaluation
Fan Du, Catherine Plaisant, Neil Spring, Ben Shneiderman
CHI Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2017.
Download: [pdf] [software] [video] | Best Paper Honorable Mention

 

Coping with Volume and Variety in Temporal Event Sequences:
Strategies for Sharpening Analytic Focus
Fan Du, Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Sana Malik, Adam Perer
TVCG IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2017.
Download: [pdf] [software] | Software Licensed by 5+ Corporations

 

Visualizations of Graphs & Linked Data

iSphere: Focus+Context Sphere Visualization for Interactive Large Graph Exploration
Fan Du, Nan Cao, Yu-Ru Lin, Panpan Xu, Hanghang Tong
CHI Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2017.
Download: [pdf] [demo] [quad-tree]

 

Trajectory Bundling for Animated Transitions
Fan Du, Nan Cao, Jian Zhao, Yu-Ru Lin
CHI Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2015.
Download: [pdf] [video]

 

Work Experience


Apr 2018 - Now Adobe Research, San Jose, CA
  Senior Research Scientist, Big Data Experience Lab
Jan 2014 - Apr 2018 University of Maryland, College Park, MD
  Research Assistant, Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Summer 2017 Adobe Research, San Jose, CA
  Research Scientist Intern, Big Data Experience Lab
Summer 2014, 2015 IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
  Research Scientist Intern, Graph Computing and Social Cognitive Analytics Group
Sept 2013 - Dec 2013 University of Maryland, College Park, MD
  Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science
Sept 2012 - Mar 2013 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
  Research Scientist Intern, VisLab
Summer 2012 Tencent, Shanghai, China
  Software Engineer Intern, Interactive Entertainment Group
Summer 2011 Alibaba, Hangzhou, China
  Software Engineer Intern, Research and Development Department
Nov 2010 - June 2013 WaiMai Online (startup), Hangzhou, China  
  Founder, CTO
Oct 2010 - Sept 2012 Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
  Research Assistant, State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG