Blog
Notes on making complex data explorable. Mostly the tools and the thinking behind them, sometimes a paper or a conference, occasionally news.
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Announcing Ridge AI's Build Agent 2
Since our beta started, Ridge AI's Build Agent has turned datasets into interactive dashboards. Feedback from customers and many rounds of evals showed us where it fell short of our vision, so we r…
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Say 👋 to dtour: a visualization tool for smoothly navigating through high-dimensional data
To help you develop better intuition for high-dimensional datasets, Nezar Abdennur and I built dtour, a visualization tool for smoothly navigating through data projections.
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Jupyter Scatter v1.0 is out! 🥳
It's been a minute since the last update and quite the journey since 2020. The API has been stable for a while now, and I finally addressed the last remaining things on my list, so it felt like the…
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How does AI change the way we build visualization tools
I believe AI multiplies what's already there, meaning software design principles matter more than ever. That was the main takeaway from an invited guest lecture I gave last week in Qianwen Wang's v…
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After months of building, we're finally in closed beta at Ridge AI
Here's what Jeffrey Heer, Ellie Fields, Andy Caley, and I have been working on.
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Our panel on data visualization in the age of AI
One thread I keep coming back to: the engineering of constraints around AI-native tools.
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Enable AI agents to use your frontend app like a tool
I was curious how to make frontend apps fully programmable and built a library called MCP-Web that lets you expose state, actions, and UI as MCP tools+apps for AI while maintaining human agency.
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The Story Behind MCP-Web
Why I built a library for making frontend apps equally controllable by people and AI
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I'm joining Ridge AI
At Ridge we're building AI-native tools that let users intelligently create and explore data-rich visualization dashboards. I'm excited to push the boundary of AI-driven mixed-initiative visual dat…
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Leaving Ozette after 4+ incredible years
I'm immensely grateful to have been part of the fantastic team that Greg Finak and Evan Greene assembled. I've learned a lot and am proud of what we built together: an end-to-end platform for analy…
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Heading to CYTO?
We've been busy adding new capabilities to the conversational dashboard agent we launched a few weeks ago.
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Jupyter Scatter gets support for text labels
🥳 Adding long-overdue support for text labels that make it easier to correlate points with your underlying data.
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Thrilled to announce that after a year of research and development, our
This feature transforms how scientists interact with complex biological datasets - simply chat with your data to quickly uncover insights without needing to master the UI first.
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My ISMB BioVis keynote on challenges and opportunities for BioVis software tools
My keynote on challenges and opportunities for BioVis software tools is available at
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A new version of Jupyter Scatter is out: v0.21.0
🥳 This version introduces fun new ways to select points using either a brush or rectangle. You can now also more easily extend or reduce a selection by holding down the meta (CMD on macOS) key or…
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A host of fantastic tools for working with genomics data
To cite a few from the blog post:
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Wrapping 2024 with a new version of Jupyter Scatter
🎉 This release adds support for full-screen mode, which makes it easier to explore large-scale scatter plots. In full-screen mode, you can also create customized high-resolution exports for presen…
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Comparative embedding visualizations published at IEEE VIS
In the paper, we introduce a powerful framework and computational metrics for comparing embedding visualizations across class-label hierarchies to help discover meaningful differences quickly.
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🎉 Our Jupyter Scatter paper was published
What's Jupyter Scatter? It's an interactive scatter plot widget for exploring large-scale datasets in Jupyter Notebook/Lab, VSCode, and Google Colab with ease.
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The Insight's in the Details
In my invited keynote talk at ISMB BioVis, I discussed the challenges and opportunities in creating integrated, composable, scalable, and interactive BioVis tools. At Ozette, we embrace these princ…
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ISMB BioVis '24
As one of the two invited keynote speakers, I'm super excited to talk about challenges in BioVis software tools and how we can overcome them with software best-practices and new exciting frameworks.
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Ozette‘s last year grad research intern Devin Lange is showcasing his
Discovering high-resolution cell phenotypes is essential for finding biological meaningful biomarkers. However, at a first sight the details can be overwhelming. With Devin‘s work we‘re able to sim…
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📢 Tooltip support landed in Jupyter Scatter
Tooltips can aid in understanding the data points and patterns in a scatter plot. In Jupyter Scatter, they can include visually-encoded and other data properties and include small visualizations of…
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SciPy '23 talks are online
📢 My talk on Jupyter Scatter – a widget for exploring large-scale datasets through interactive & linked scatter plots – is available at You can find the accompanying demo notebooks at
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Single-cell data visualization at ISMB BioVis 2023
Comparing two embedding visualizations can be challenging due to batch effects, stochasticity, and the sheer complexity of the plots. Spearheaded by Trevor Manz during his internship at Ozette, we…
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It's great to be back the SciPy conference
Check out for the tutorial & slides. In the tutorials we're showing example on how to use Jupyter Scatter to explore single-cell, image, text, geospatial, and genomic embedding data.
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Workshop on high-dimensional data
Huge shoutout to Jen Rogers who organized a big part of the workshop. Looking forward to continuing the collaboration with everyone!
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Comparative embedding visualization for single-cell data
Comparing multiple embeddings can be challenging due to batch effects, missing point correspondences, and the sheer complexity of of the data.
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regl-scatterplot got published 🎉
Some new features that I added over the last year include fast point filtering, animated zooming to points, and lasso selection on long press. See for a demo video. (Pssst, if you code primarily in…
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ISMB 2023 conference talks are online
If you're working with #singlecell data, check out the talks from Evan Greene and myself on #clustering and #embedding #visualization.
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Reflecting 2022 at Ozette
Trevor's research will help us surface insightful differences between single-cell embeddings. We'll share more details in the near future!
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Looking for a graduate summer intern at Ozette
At Ozette Technologies, a biotech startup from Fred Hutch and AI2, we are looking for a graduate summer intern to research with us on the above-mentioned and related areas. If this sounds interesti…
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I received the EuroVis Best PhD Award 🙇♂️
Huuuge thanks to all awardees, the hard-working committee, all my wonderful collaborators (especially Benjamin Bach, Peter Kerpedjiev, Nezar Abdennur, PhD, Krzysztof Gajos, Spyridon Ampanavos, Eric…
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How to give effective design feedback
Here is a blog post we wrote to summarize our recent work on enhancing design feedback:
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Preprint for 'Ask me or tell me' is out
Enhancing the Effectiveness of Crowdsourced Design Feedback"! Great work with the fabulous Spyridon Ampanavos, Krzysztof Gajos, Pao Siangliulue, and Hanspeter Pfister
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Our paper on visual piling won a best paper honorable mention
Great collaboration with Xinyi Zhou, Wei Chen, Nils Gehlenborg, Benjamin Bach, and Hanspeter Pfister
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EuroVis paper on interactive visual pattern search in sequential data is accepted
Check out our video at for a quick introduction and visit for more details. Also, the code and data are freely and openly available at
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SciPy conference talk on HiGlass
Here's the recording of my joint #talk with @Nezar Abdennur, PhD from last week's absolutely amazing SciPy #conference We presented the HiGlass framework and how it can be used as a widget in Jupyt…
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I am looking forward to presenting new work on epigenomic data
A fun project between the Visual Computing Group (at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) and the Scientific Data Analysis group (at Novartis Institutes for BioMedica…