Abstract: 

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) — the largest collection of open internet performance data on the planet — collects hundreds of thousands of consumer internet performance tests daily and provides that data in the public domain for research, analysis and advocacy. With data piling up since 2009, M-Lab has over 5 petabytes of information about the quality of experience on the internet and more data is generated every day. Big data at this scale presents interesting challenges for everything from readability, visualization, navigation to public access and affordability.The M-Lab data allows anyone to explore how their internet experience is mediated by all of the various actors that make up the internet. We recently worked with the M-Lab team to develop a data processing pipeline, API and visualizations to make the data more accessible to anyone interested in exploring open internet through consumer measurements. We would love to share our experience on both the technical and design fronts with your audience.

Bio: 

Irene Ros is the founding Director of the Bocoup Data Visualization group at Bocoup where she has led visualization projects with partners like Google, New America, The Guardian, The World Economic Forum, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Therapeutic Science, MIT’s Probabilistic Computing group, University of Washington’s Interactive Data Lab and University of Chicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.

She and her team transform raw data into visual experiences for the Open Web and contribute to the web ecosystem through open tools and educational materials about data visualization. Irene is also the Founder and Program Chair of OpenVis Conf, a 2-day single-track conference about data visualization on the Open Web, entering its 5th year.

Prior to her time at Bocoup, Irene spent 3 years working at IBM Research’s Visual Communication Lab, under the guidance of Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. Together with the team she helped build Many Eyes - a collaborative data visualization creation and sharing tool and Many Bills - a visual interface for reading congressional legislation. Her work has been written about in the New York Times and the New York Times Open Blog as well as Fast Company.

Irene received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2006 with the Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement Award in Software Engineering as well as the 2011 Outstanding Achievement by a Young Alum for her contributions to research in data visualization. Her undergraduate thesis focused on the use of visual agent coordination language to model a real-world medical process: adult outpatient chemotherapy.

Irene is a frequent speaker on topics ranging from data visualization, to creating and supporting open source ecosystems on the web.

Check out her work at Github: @iros or work http://bocoup.com/datavis