We wish to read datasets (text, logs, relational tables, hierarchies, streams, images, …) and display interesting aspects of their content. The design to do this rests on the grammar of graphics, scagnostics, and a modeler based on the logic of statistical analysis. We distinguish an automatic visualization system (AVS) from an automated visualization system. The former automatically makes decisions about what is to be visualized. The latter is a programming system for automating the production of charts, graphs and visualizations. An AVS is designed to provide a first glance at data before modeling and analysis are done. AVS is designed to protect researchers from ignoring missing data, outliers, miscodes and other anomalies that can violate statistical assumptions or otherwise jeopardize the validity of models. This talk will cover the theory and operation of the AutoViz implementation of AVS inside Driverless AI.

Wilkinson is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has won best speaker award at the National Computer Graphics Association and the Youden prize for best expository paper in the statistics journal Technometrics. He has served on the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Research Council and is a member of the Boards of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). In addition to authoring journal articles, the original SYSTAT computer program and manuals, and patents in visualization and distributed analytic computing, Wilkinson is the author (with Grant Blank and Chris Gruber) of Desktop Data Analysis with SYSTAT. He is also the author of The Grammar of Graphics, the foundation for several commercial and open­source visualization systems (IBM­RAVE, Tableau, R­ggplot2, and Python­Bokeh).