About Me

Hi! I’m Josh Pollock, a fourth year PhD student at MIT. I work on domain-specific languages for visualization in the VIS group with Arvind Satyanarayan.

My current interest is in helping people create and reason about all kinds of visualizations, not just the ones data visualization most commonly studies like bar charts and scatterplots, but also the ones we don’t, like chemical reactions, concept maps, and neural network architecture diagrams. We read these graphic representations the same way we read charts:

• using elementary perceptual tasks identified by Cleveland & McGill

• using perceptual grouping principles identified by Gestalt psychologists

Together these form, respectively, the elementary and compositional mappings from data to visual elements. By sprinkling in a little PL magic, we can leverage this structure to build software tools that empower more people to make more graphic representations. And these graphic representations can dramatically improve our ability to think and communicate ideas.

Prior to my work at MIT, I spent four years at the University of Washington earning my B.S. in Computer Science and working in the PLSE group with Zachary Tatlock, Jared Roesch, and Eunice Jun. This was an incredibly collaborative research environment where I learned a ton by being a fly on the wall during lots of research discussions, lunch talks, and seminars. It was also where I was introduced to PL+X, the idea of applying PL techniques to areas outside of core PL.

Outside of work I enjoy dancing (currently salsa, in the past house and hip hop), playing bass guitar, and gardening.