Thomas Davidson

About Me

I am in the second year of my PhD studies working with Emily Wall in the Cognition and Vision Lab at Emory University. My research focuses on Information Visualisation through the lens of Personal Informatics. I am particularly interested in the kinds of insights users want to gain into their behaviour and how these insights can be effectively communicated to them and others.

Prior to working with Dr. Wall I was a PhD Candidate working with Jonathan Mace in the Cloud Software Systems Group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems before he left the institute for a role in industry in 2022. During my time at Max Planck I worked on Distributed Tracing Visualisation. I completed my Undergraduate and Masters degree at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and in my final year there I worked on developing novel visualisation techniques for English Literature.

Outside of my work I am an active runner, rugby and cricket player. I also entertain an unhealthy obsession with public transport metro systems.

Projects

My current research focuses on developing novel visualisation techniques for displaying music listening history. More generally, my research interests lie in communicating insights from personal datasets to casual users and facilitating explorative analysis. A lot of my work has focused on qualitative research methods and I enjoy working directly with potential users. In addition, I have experience working with prototyping and designing systems as well implementing them. I also feel strongly about the importance of aesthetics and design in information visualisation, especially in the field of Personal Informatics.

PhD Research

Spotify Warped

We conducted a crowd-sourced survey to understand the kinds of insights users wanted to learn about their music listening history. Through this lens we examined and contrasted the information desires of casual users and Self-Tracking users. We explored barriers that exist for users accessing and engaging with their data and we established an information space to describe the abstract insights users wanted to learn before outlining how well existing summaries satisfy these information needs. We highlighted distinct differences between casual users and those who commit significant time to tracking and establish how well existing frameworks can explain these users needs.
This work is currently under submission and is available on request.

The Impact of Data Facts on Confirmation Bias

I was the second author on a project led by Shiyao Li which examined how Data Facts (generated data summaries) attached to ambiguous visualisations can influence confirmation bias in viewers.
This work is currently under submission and is available on request.

Distributed Tracing Visualisation

I conducted a qualitative interview study with collaborators from industry which characterised the problem space of distributed tracing visualisation formally for the first time. Across two rounds of 1-on-1 interviews with 6 practitioners we used grounded theory coding to establish users, use cases, and identify shortcomings of existing distributed tracing tools. We derive guidelines for the development of future distributed tracing tools and expose several open research problems that have wide reaching implications for visualisation research and other domains. This work was published in TVCG and presented at IEEE VIS 2023 in Melbourne.

The State of Visualisation in Systems Research

When assessing the existing state of visualisation in distributed tracing it became clear that little to no work has been done which focuses on the human aspect of distributed tracing. I undertook a survey study which examined the presentation of user facing aspects in the more general field of systems research focussing on human-in-the-loop tools. The findings from this work suggested that despite the implemented tools often being a fundamental contribution of the work, they were frequently under presented, designed, and explained. This work was published at the Symposium on Cloud Computing in 2022 and presented in San Francisco.

TraVista

I helped to develop and design the visualisations used in a piece of work that investigated augmenting individual trace visualisations with aggregate data for performance debugging.

Personal Data Visualisations

Artistic Music Listening History

This project represents a creative explorative visualisation of my own personal music listening history. Implemented using d3 I present visual representations of my listening history ranging from one day of data, to visualising all 12 years of my listening on Spotify. The visualisation design is intended to be abstract and leans on the metaphors of soundwaves (for the day visualisation) and a wending path through my discovery of new artists (for the year visualisation).

Digital Relationships

Digital Relationships is a data visualisation project that allows users to generate explorative and informative visualisations based on their own Facebook messaging data. The website lets you explore your messages over time and produce customisable infographics directly linked to your digital relationships with others. The work was selected and presented at the 2021 Science Gallery Youth Symposium.

Undergraduate & Masters Projects

An Exploratory Analysis Visualisation Tool for Classic English Literature

During my masters I worked on developing a tool which facilitated exploratory analysis of literature through visualisation and interaction techniques. The approaches I implemented built on previous approaches to abstract text visualisation and augmented them to enable users to gain insight into sentence structure, character and location references, as well as the age of language used throughout the text. I was supervised by Tim Regan from Microsoft Research and Alan Blackwell from the University of Cambridge.

Using Machine Learning to Solve a Rubik's Cube

For my undergraduate dissertation I analysed the performance of a machine learning approach to solving a semi-scrambled rubik's cube when compared to human participants with varying levels of experience.

CV


Education


PhD: 2023-Present

Emory University

PhD (Discontinued): 2019-2022

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems - University of Saarland

BA Hons. and MEng, Computer Science | 1st Class with Distinction | 2015-2019

University of Cambridge


Experience


Software Engineer Intern | July 2018 - August 2018

GeoSpock, Cambridge

Graduate Engineer Intern | July 2017 - September 2017

BAE Systems - Applied Intelligence, Guildford

Microsoft Student Partner | April 2016 - June 2017

Microsoft, Cambridge

Software Development Engineer | July 2015 - September 2015 (Intern September 2014 - November 2014)

Vision Blue Solutions, Dublin


Full CV


Link to PDF

Contact

Address

Office W302, Maths and Science Center
Emory University, 400 Dowman Drive
Atlanta, GA, USA
30322