IBM Watson Research Center

Matt McKeon Contact: mmmckeon@us.ibm.com Research Interests: visualizations network -enabled communities social data analysis Matt joined CUE's Visual Communication Lab in August, and is currently working with Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas on a variety of projects. His interests include building usable platforms for social data analysis, designing tools to support network-enabled communities, and moving information off the screen and into the world around us. Matt graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1998 with a degree in Computer Science and English, specializing in graphics and media computation. He then joined a startup with two CMU researchers, MAYA Viz (now owned by General Dynamics), that built collaborative visualization systems. In his work as a developer, he created tools to help customers visualize and share data throughout their organizations. His efforts involved travel to Iraq to study and support the use of such systems among military personnel in the field. Matt earned his master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech in 2006. His thesis project (with advisor Keith Edwards) focused on using ambient displays to help meeting participants understand high-tech conference rooms. Matt hails from Washington DC, and, as a result, is convinced that politics really matter. He is married to a Harvard sociologist who is in a completely different field; nevertheless, they are determined to write a paper together someday. He also enjoys biking, cooking, making art with electricity, and travel to far-flung places.