Bits from the Data Store

Semi-regular field notes from the world of data: Alibaba ♥ Spark: Next time someone asks you if Apache Spark scales, point them to this recent post by Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba. What particularly caught my eye is the company’s heavy usage of GraphX, Spark’s library for graph analytics. [Full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Databricks,Continue reading “Bits from the Data Store”

Bits from the Data Store

Semi-regular field notes from the world of data (gathered from Scifoo 2014): Filtergraph and the power of visual exploration: A web-based tool for exploring high-dimensional data sets, Filtergraph came out of the lab of Astrophysicist Keivan Stassun. It has helped researchers make several interesting discoveries including a paper (that appeared in Nature) on a techniqueContinue reading “Bits from the Data Store”

Bits from the Data Store

Semi-regular field notes from the world of data: Tucked away in the community room at the recent GraphLab conference, I took a few people to a demo by Graphistry, a startup that lets users visually interact and analyze massive amounts of data. In particular their technology can handle and draw many more points than d3.jsContinue reading “Bits from the Data Store”

Network Science Dashboards

Networks graphs can be used as primary visual objects with conventional charts used to supply detailed views [A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Data blog.] With Network Science well on its way to being an established academic discipline, we’re beginning to see tools that leverage it. Applications that draw heavily from thisContinue reading “Network Science Dashboards”

What I use for data visualization

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Data blog.] Depending on the nature of the problem, data size, and deliverable, I still draw upon an array of tools for data visualization. As I survey the Design track at next month’s Strata conference, I see creators and power users of visualization tools that manyContinue reading “What I use for data visualization”