Hi, welcome to the specialization and information visualization. My name is Enrico Bertini and I am your main instructor for the specialization. I am an associate professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and I have been doing research and teaching in this area for many, many years. I am also the co-host of a popular podcast called Data Stories, where I talk together with Moritz Stefaner about data visualization and anything related to data. So, my guess is that if you're watching this video, you've probably heard of visualization, and you've also noticed that in recent years, it grew really, really a lot in popularity. So some of the areas where you may have seen visualization growing are data journalism. So there are lots of newspapers that produce amazing graphics like The New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times and so on. Another area is vendors and products, as you saw there are lots of new products. For instance, Tableau, Qlik, and open source projects. Very popular ones like ggplot2, D3, and a lot of new ones coming basically every day. There is also a very thriving scientific community with new conferences coming up every year. Lots of publications at research labs growing all around the world. And finally, in data science, visualization plays a very, very major role. And some of the major startups and companies out there tend to have strong data visualization groups. Notable examples are Uber, Netflix, Capital One, and many others. So, typically persons who are trying to learn visualization, or are learning visualization skills, can use these skills in many, many different areas. So, as I said, in data science, in data journalism. You can also become an independent designer, there are several very successful ones, and in general as an analyst or as a scientist you can use data visualization skills in many many different ways. So, what all these areas have in common when we talk about the use of visualization is the basic idea of transforming data into something that enhances the comprehension of what is described by the data. And there is kind of need a little bit of everywhere, and the reason why this is growing and growing is because the availability of data has been growing and growing in recent years. So that's what is happening here. So let's switch to talking about, specifically about the specialization. Okay, the main goal of the specialization is to teach you how to design, evaluate and develop interactive visualizations to help people generate insights and then communicate these insights to other people as effectively as possible. That's the main goal of the course. And we try to strike a balance between practical skills, but also very useful theoretical knowledge. The knowledge that is going to stay with you no matter what changes in technology are going to come in the future, very important foundations. So in the course we have a lot of practical examples, we tried as much as possible to use real-world data sets and cases. We also try to provide the cutting edge knowledge coming from research and latest sources. And we also have a lot of practical programming skills, especially, in one of the courses that is totally focus on programming. So, we have four main courses in the specialization. The first one is Introduction to Information Visualization. That's a broad introduction and it's meant to give you the foundations, the main foundations behind the discipline of Information Visualization. In the second course, we talk about mainly Applied Perception For Visualization. These are very basic skills that you need in order to understand how visualization works and how humans perceive visualizations. Then we have the third course that is completely focused on programming. And here we are going to teach you how to program interactive visualizations using the very popular D3 JavaScript library, okay. This is very important because you want to be able to build interactive visualization in practice and D3 is by far the most popular language. Finally, we have an advanced course at the end that talks about, introduces the main advanced techniques that exist in visualization that go beyond the basic techniques that we introduce in the first course. And we also talk a lot more about interactive methods. How to make visualizations interactive. Why and when to make them interactive, and how to do it in practice through programming. So, the specialization has five main objectives. The first one is to teach you how to use graphs appropriately, how to choose the right graph for a given problem. The second one is to teach you how to evaluate visualization designs, whether they come from your own work or from other people's work. A very important skill. We also teach you how to innovate. How do you come up with new visualization methods or techniques that is needed for something specific you need for your work or for very specific needs of a new project? That's very important. Of course, we also introduce, we also talk about how to code information visualization. Which is exactly what I just said that is covered in course three. And finally, an overarching goal is to teach you how to go from the specification of a problem to transforming this problem and the data into a working information visualization. So that's all for now, and I wish you a good journey into the specialization in information visualization.
