John Alexis Guerra Gómez
I do Visual Analytics, i.e., I include the user in the big data analysis/science loop.
I create visual analytics systems that leverage interactive information visualizations and powerful algorithms to enable users to explore their own data to find actionable insights.
Traditional data science excludes users from the exploration process, applying algorithms that look like black boxes to them, and forcing users to make sense of the results afterwards.
My Skills
The tools and techniques I use
Experience and Education
Things I'm proud of
- Exploring information visualization interfaces for navigating big repositories of photos.
- Helped redesigned Flickr stats.
- Developed and deployed a visualization for better exploring the organizational units that is being used company wide.
- Built a system for exploring the best photos in Flickr based in geo-location.
- Two paper collaborations in CHI 2016.
- Created visual analytics for dozens of complex Yahoo datasets.
- 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.
- Creator of force-in-a-box a network layout that better distributes nodes according to their clusters or any other grouping attribute [Demo]
- Creator of netClustering.js a purely Javascript network clustering library that runs in the browser [Demo]
- Co-creator of tweetometro.co a platform to monitor Twitter activity for the Colombian presidential election.
- Creator of WholikesMyFB.com a Facebook app to explore who likes your post the most.
- Other experiments Tradeflow: A tool to compare the imports/exports of products in countries of the Americas
- PhD and MSc in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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
Selected papers and publications
- 2016 John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Cati Boulanger, Sanjay Kairam, David A. Shamma, Identifying Best Practices for Visualizing Photo Statistics and Galleries using Treemaps. AVI 2016: ACM International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces [To Appear]
- 2016 John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Aaron Wilson, Juan Liu, Dan Davies, Peter Jarvis and Eric Bier, Design, Implementation, and Real World Deployment of the Network Explorer, a Large Network Visual Analytics Tool. AVI 2016: ACM International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces [To Appear]
- 2016 Frank Bentley, Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye, David A. Shamma, John Alexis Guerra Gómez, "The 32 Days Of Christmas: Understanding Temporal Intent in Image Search Queries ". CHI 2016: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [To Appear]
- 2016 Sanjay Kairam, Jofish Kaye, John Alexis Guerra Gómez, David Ayman Shamma, "Snap Decisions? How Users, Content, and Aesthetics Interact to Shape Photo Sharing Behaviors". CHI 2016: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [To Appear]
- 2015 John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Michael L. Pack, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman, Discovering temporal changes in hierarchical transportation data: Visual analytics & text reporting tools", Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Volume 51, February 2015, Pages 167-179, ISSN 0968-090X, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2014.11.007.
- 2014 Juan Liu, Eric Bier, Aaron Wilson, Tomo Honda, Sricharan Kumar, Leilani Gilpin, John Guerra-Gomez, Daniel Davies, Graph Analysis for Detecting Fraud,Waste, and Abuse in Healthcare Data. Twenty-Seventh IAAI Conference. AAAI Publications
- 2013 John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Michael L. Pack, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman, B. Visualizing Change over Time Using Dynamic Hierarchies: TreeVersity2 and the StemView. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 19(12), 2566–75. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2013.231 Preprint PDF
- 2013 John Alexis Guerra Gómez. Exploring differences in multivariate datasets using hierarchies, An interactive information visualization Approach. PhD Thesis. Computer Science Deparment. University Maryland at College Park. UMD Link | HCIL Link
- 2013 John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Audra Buck-Coleman, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman. TreeVersity: Interactive Visualizations for Comparing Hierarchical Datasets". In Proceedings of the Transportation Research Board 92th annual meeting, The National Academies, Washington, DC (2013). Honored with the 2013 Greg Herrington Award for Excellence in Visualization Research from the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences Transportation Research Board (TRB).
- 2012 John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Audra Buck-Coleman, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman. "TreeVersity: Visualizing Hierarchical Data for Value with Topology Changes", Design Research Society Conference Bangkok 2012.
- 2011 Krist Wongsuphasawat, John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Catherine Plaisant, Taowei David Wang, Meirav Taieb Maimon and Ben Shneiderman. “LifeFlow: Visualizing an Overview of Event Sequences”. In Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'11), 1747-1756.
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
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:
