Alper Sarikaya's smiling mug

Alper Sarikaya

I build software enabling people to create data visualizations in order to help everyone make sense of large amounts of data.

I attended the University of Washington, and then earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My experience includes creating visualizations for biological analyses and using visualization to summarize large amounts of data to highlight trends, patterns, and anomalies. Currently, I work as an senior R&D software engineer for Microsoft's data visualization product: Power BI.

Find me on Twitter, GitHub, Reddit, Mastodon, and Keybase. My CV is available, as well as statements on research and teaching on request.

More details »

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Twitter: capturing basic info about all your followers

Capturing your follower's basic info so you make sure you follow them wherever you go next!

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VIS 2021 Recap

A practitioner-focused roundup from the IEEE VIS 2021 virtual conference.

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VIS 2020 Recap

A practitioner-focused roundup from the IEEE VIS 2020 virtual conference.

Publications

Chart Reader: Accessible Visualization Experiences Designed with Screen Reader Users

Chart Reader: Accessible Visualization Experiences Designed with Screen Reader Users

John R Thompson, Jesse J Martinez, Alper Sarikaya, Edward Cutrell, Bongshin Lee
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (proceedings CHI 2023)

Through a co-design study, synthesized an engine to construct accessible visualization experiences for screen-reader users.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Dashboards?

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Dashboards?

Alper Sarikaya, Michael Correll, Lyn Bartram, Melanie Tory, Danyel Fisher
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (proceedings InfoVis 2018)

Categorized features of dashboards to recognize the open challenges for general visualization communication.

Design Factors for Summary Visualization in Visual Analytics

Design Factors for Summary Visualization in Visual Analytics

Alper Sarikaya, Michael Gleicher, Danielle Albers Szafir
Computer Graphics Forum (proceedings EuroVis 2018)

Categorized different types of summaries used in visualization to identify how those decisions affect their use.

Scatterplots: Tasks, Data, and Designs

Scatterplots: Tasks, Data, and Designs

Alper Sarikaya, Michael Gleicher
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (proceedings InfoVis 2017)

Identified factors (tasks and data characteristics) that lead to changes in design strategies for effective scatterplot design.

Sequence Pre-processing: Focusing Analysis of Log Event Data

Sequence Pre-processing: Focusing Analysis of Log Event Data

Alper Sarikaya, Emanuel Zgraggen, Rob DeLine, Steven Drucker, Danyel Fisher
Proceedings of the IEEE VIS 2016 Workshop on Temporal & Sequential Event Analysis (proceedings IEEE VIS 2016)

Identified methods for focusing large amounts of log event data for downstream analysis and provenance.

Visualizing Co-occurrence of Events in Populations of Viral Genome Sequences

Visualizing Co-occurrence of Events in Populations of Viral Genome Sequences

Alper Sarikaya, Michael Correll, Jorge M. Dinis, David H. O'Connor, Michael Gleicher
Computer Graphics Forum (proceedings EuroVis 2016)

Iteratively designed an visualization to help rapidly identify co-occurrences of base-pair mutations in populations of viral genomes.

Lightness Constancy in Surface Visualization

Lightness Constancy in Surface Visualization

Danielle Albers Szafir, Alper Sarikaya, Michael Gleicher
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (proceedings SciVis 2016)

Identified and empirically tested the effects of rendering decisions on the recovery of color information from 3D surfaces.

LayerCake: A Tool for the Visual Comparison of Viral Deep Sequencing Data

LayerCake: A Tool for the Visual Comparison of Viral Deep Sequencing Data

Michael Correll, Adam Bailey, Alper Sarikaya, David H. O'Connor, Michael Gleicher
Bioinformatics, 2015

Designed and implemented a visualization system to rapidly identify correlations of mutations between viral genome samples.

Using WebGL as an Interactive Visualization Medium: Our Experience Developing SplatterJs

Using WebGL as an Interactive Visualization Medium: Our Experience Developing SplatterJs

Alper Sarikaya, Michael Gleicher
1st Workshop on Data Systems for Interactive Analysis (proceedings IEEE VIS 2015)

WebGL is used to port the Splatterplot implementation to scale to large amounts of data on the web.

Navigating Reductionism and Holism in Evaluation

Navigating Reductionism and Holism in Evaluation

Michael Correll, Eric Alexander, Danielle Albers, Alper Sarikaya, Michael Gleicher
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Beyond Time and Errors: Novel Evaluation Methods for Visualization (proceedings BELIV '14)

Our laboratory's philosophy toward visualization evaluation: evaluate from both a holistic and reductionist perspective.

Visualizing Validation of Protein Surface Classifiers

Visualizing Validation of Protein Surface Classifiers

Alper Sarikaya, Danielle Albers (Szafir), Julie C. Mitchell, Michael Gleicher
Computer Graphics Forum (proceedings EuroVis 2014)

Iteratively designed a visualization to summarize and present classifier results on many 3D molecular structures.