Speakers and Workshop Leaders

Ann K. Emery

Ann K. Emery is an internationally acclaimed speaker who equips organizations to get their data out of dusty spreadsheets and into real-world conversations.

Each year, she delivers over 100 keynotes, workshops, and webinars with the aim of equipping organizations to visualize data more effectively. She has been invited to speak in 31 states and 11 countries; 10,000 people have enrolled in her online training academy; and she has consulted to 200 organizations, including the United Nations, Centers for Disease Control, and Harvard University.

She earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a Master’s degree from George Mason University. After traveling full-time as a digital nomad, Ann now resides in Florida along with her husband and five children.

Zan Armstrong

As a data visualization and data strategy consultant, Zan changes how people look at their data (literally) -- leading to scientific discoveries and deeper understanding, sparking new data-driven questions, and enabling better decision-making.

Zan's visualization work has supported critical scientific research initiatives, from tracking COVID-19 in wastewater to collaborating with Google Research teams applying ML and large scale computing to science. Additionally, visualizations originally created for research, understanding bacterial life in extreme environments or AI model internals, have been lauded and exhibited by art and design museums SF MOMA, Ars Electronica, Cube, and Cooper Hewitt. During the pandemic, she advised Google's Search team on displaying COVID-19 data charts used by millions globally and created charts for the SCAN wastewater project informing scientists, the public, public health officials, CDC, and the White House about the prevalence of emerging pathogens. In general she is passionate about making sure that whatever is most important about the data is the most noticeable feature in the chart.

Zan's practice includes advising domain experts, collaborating with visualization teams, prototyping analytical tools, and developing novel visualization solutions to complex analytic problems. She has created visualizations for leading scientific institutions (Yale, CDC, Stanford, Verily) and publications (Scientific American, National Geographic). Zan shares her expertise through teaching Design of Data at Stanford's d.school, publishing research, writing articles, and speaking at visualization conferences like Outlier, OpenVisConf, and IEEE Viz. Zan's focus on data visualization for analysis is grounded in her earlier work as a data analyst and lead revenue forecaster at Google.

Rodrigo Ferreira

Rodrigo Ferreira is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Computer Science at Rice University, where he is responsible for the ethics in computer science curriculum. In this role, Rodrigo teaches courses on the ethics of computing, data science, and artificial intelligence, and develops research on ethics in computer science education, computational culture, and tech policy.

Rodrigo’s research has been published in various academic venues, including ACM and IEEE publications, and philosophy journals, such as Teaching Ethics, and has been featured in news media channels, including The Houston Chronicle, Telemundo, and NPR. Rodrigo is also co-creator (in collaboration with Dr. Moshe Vardi) of “Deep Tech Ethics” as a pedagogical approach that seeks to include greater focus on social responsibility in computer science education and is co-author of the “AI Ethics” recommendation report in the Mexican National AI Agenda (2020).

In addition to his position in Computer Science, Rodrigo also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Philosophy, is a member of Steering Committee for the Science and Technology Studies Program, and is a Faculty Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy.

John Alexis Guerra Gómez

John Alexis Guerra Gómez is an Information Visualization Researcher and Engineer, who helps people extract insights from their data using interactive infovis and data science. John conducts research on Visual Analytics, Accessibility, Big data, Human Computer Interaction and Web Development. He is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University Bay Area, where he is a member of the Khoury Visualization Lab. John has also worked at UCBerkeley, Uniandes Colombia, Yahoo Labs, Xerox PARC and DUTO.

Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy is a Professor of Sociology at Duke University. Much of his research has been about the social organization of exchange in human blood and organs, cultural goods, software, and ideas. His current work focuses on the moral order of market society, the effect of models and measurement on social classification, and the link between those two topics. Professor Healy also works on techniques and methods for data visualization, and some problems in social theory.

Nikita Rokotyan, PhD

Nikita Rokotyan is a full-stack data visualization specialist with a background in atmospheric physics and creative technologies. He is the founder of Interacta, an award-winning team of scientists, designers, and engineers who develop beautiful and functional tools for working with data.

Nikita frequently incorporates AI and machine learning into his work. Among his recent creations are Cosmograph, the fastest web-based tool for visualizing AI embeddings and network graphs; Unovis, a popular data visualization library for the web; and Market Map, an experimental stock market visualization that won the Information is Beautiful Awards and was nominated for The Webby Awards.