Dominik Moritz

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Professor at CMU HCII and Research Manager at Apple.

Research Area

To enhance people's ability to understand and communicate large and complex data, I develop methods that richly integrate the capabilities of both people and machines. I combine methods from visualization, data management, programming languages, and human-computer interaction to enable effective methods for data analysis and communication. My systems have won awards at premier academic venues, and are used by journalists, data enthusiasts, developers, educators, and the data science community.

Positions

2020–present Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA
Assistant Professor, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Data Interaction Group
2019–present Apple Seattle, WA and Pittsburgh, PA
Research Scientist, AIML visualization team
2019 Streamlit San Francisco, CA
Researcher, developed caching and visualization
2013–2019 University of Washington Seattle, WA
Research Assistant, Interactive Data Lab and UW Database Group
2017 Microsoft Research Redmond, WA
Research Intern, mentored by Danyel Fisher working with PowerBI team
2016 Microsoft Research Redmond, WA
Research Intern, mentored by Danyel Fisher working with database research team
2015 Google Research Mountain View, CA
Research Intern, Structured Data research team
2014 Google New York City, NY
Engineering Intern, Monarch monitoring system team
2012–2013 Open Knowledge Foundation London and Berlin
Intern and Developer, datastore, previews, automatic data ingestion
2012–2013 Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam
Bachelor's Project

Education

2015–2019 Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington Seattle, WA

Advised by Jeffrey Heer and Bill Howe.
Thesis: “Interactive Systems for Scalable Visualization & Analysis”.
Member of the Interactive Data Lab and Database Group.

2013–2015 M.S. in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington Seattle, WA

Advised by Bill Howe and Jeffrey Heer.

2010–2013 B.S. in IT-Systems Engineering, Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam, Germany

Thesis: “Algorithms for the Visualization of Software System Evolution”.
GPA: 4.0 (1.0 in German system), highest distinction, rank 1/74
Advanced classes on database implementation, computational geometry, architecture, and logic.

Notable Awards

2025 Redbird Award

For "Exploring Empty Spaces: Human-in-the-Loop Data Augmentation".

2024 Visualization Significant New Researcher Award

For impactful work in the development of software infrastructure that has influenced both research and practice.

Publications [Interactive Version]

Conference

C3
Exploring Empty Spaces: Human-in-the-Loop Data Augmentation
Catherine Yeh, Donghao Ren, Yannick Assogba, Dominik Moritz, Fred Hohman. CHI, 2025. Best Paper Honorable Mention
C2
Opening the Black Box of 3D Reconstruction Error Analysis with VECTOR
Racquel Fygenson, Kazi Jawad, Zongzhan Li, Francois Ayoub, Robert G Deen, Scott Davidoff, Dominik Moritz, Mauricio Hess-Flores. VIS, 2024.
C1
Talaria: Interactively Optimizing Machine Learning Models for Efficient Inference
Fred Hohman, Chaoqun Wang, Jinmook Lee, Jochen Görtler, Dominik Moritz, Jeffrey P Bigham, Zhile Ren, Cecile Foret, Qi Shan, Xiaoyi Zhang. CHI, 2024. Best Paper Honorable Mention

Journal

Book Chapter

Demo

Workshop

Thesis

Patents

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Student Mentoring

2023–present

Hwei-Shin Harriman

CMU

PhD Student. Co-advised with Josh Sunshine.

2021–present

Frank Elavsky

CMU

PhD Student. Co-advised with Patrick Carrington.

2020–present

Will Epperson

CMU

PhD Student. Co-advised with Adam Perer.

2020–2022

Carol Xinyi Zheng

CMU

PhD Student.

2020

Mary Beth Kery

CMU

Thesis Commitee.

2020–2021

Kai Ye

CMU

Thesis Commitee.

2023

Tomas Cabezon Pedroso

CMU

Thesis Commitee.

2024

Trevor Manz

Harvard Medical School

Thesis Commitee.

2024

Yiru Chen

Columbia University

Thesis Commitee.

2023

Jeffrey Tao

Columbia University

Thesis Commitee.

2024

Yanna Lin

CMU

Visiting Researcher.

2023

Karim Benharrak

CMU

Visiting Researcher. Co-advised with David Lindlbauer.

2022–2024

Péter Gyarmati

CMU

Research Collaborator. Peter was at the University of Vienna. We worked on Draco2.

2022–2024

Junran Yang

CMU

Research Collaborator. Junran was at the University of Washington. We worked on Draco2, scalable visualization, and debugging visualizations.

2022–2023

Zehua Zeng

CMU

Research Collaborator. Zehua was at the University of Maryland. We worked on Draco2.

2022–2023

Donny Bertucci

CMU

Research Collaborator. Donny was at Oregon State and we worked together on Falcon.

2020–2024

Lukas Hermann

CMU

Research Collaborator. Lukas and I worked together on Vega visualizations. He now works at Databricks.

2024

Apple Summer Internship

Apple
2023

Apple Summer Internship

Apple
2022

Apple Summer Internship

Apple

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

2021

Apple Summer Internship

Apple

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

2020

Apple Summer Internship

Apple

Summer interns in my group at Apple.

2023

Research Assistants

CMU
2021

Research Assistants

CMU
2020

Research Assistants

CMU
2019–2020

Hung Ngo

Vega

Research Collaborator. Hung worked with me on a renderer service for Vega-Lite and Vega visualizations. He integrated the renderer into the popular Vega online editor.

2019

Google Summer of Code

University of Washington

The IDL was selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2019. I mentored two students from India to work on the Vega editor.

2018

Google Summer of Code

University of Washington

The IDL was selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2018. Together with Kanit "Ham" Wongsuphasawat I mentored two students from India to work on Vega-Lite.

2017–2018

CSE Mentoring Program

University of Washington

Together with Sarah Chasins, I mentored a group of first-year students for over a year. Sarah and I gave advice on finding classes, research projects, collaborators, and advisors, as well as managing conferences.

2015–2019

Undergraduate Researchers

University of Washington

Mentor students for working on Vega-Lite, Voyager, Polestar, and related projects.

Talks [Interactive Version]

TEST: Mosaic, An Architecture for Scalable & Interoperable Data Views

Harvard Medical School

TEset Mosaic, An Architecture for Scalable & Interoperable Data Views (Dominik's Version)

Princeton HCI Seminar

Data Visualization for the Resistance

William Pierson Lecture at Princeton

Teaching

2024 Programming Usable Interfaces (PUI) Carnegie Mellon University

Instructor, 65 students

2022 Data Visualization Carnegie Mellon University

Instructor, 50 students
Prepared and taught lectures. Prepared and graded assignments.

2021 Data Visualization Carnegie Mellon University

Instructor, 35 students
Prepared and taught lectures. Prepared and graded assignments. Co-taught with Adam Perer.

2020 Interactive Data Science Carnegie Mellon University

Instructor, 75 students
Prepared and taught lectures. Prepared and graded assignments. Co-taught with Adam Perer.

2018 Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics OpenVis Conf Workshop

Prepared and presented 3.5 hour tutorial at OpenVis Conf in Paris.

2017 HCID 520: User Interface Software & Technology University of Washington

Teaching Assistant for Jeffrey Heer, 30 students
Presented sesssions, updated assignments, graded, held office hours.

2015 CSE 512: Data Visualization University of Washington

Teaching Assistant for Jeffrey Heer, 80 students
Developed and presented tutorials on visualization tools, CSS, and D3. Graded assignments, held office hours.

2017 Vega-Lite Workshop San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD

2016 Vega-Lite Workshop UC Davis

2014 SQL Workshop UW eScience Institute

Instructor, 20 participants
One day workshop for scientists as part of Software Carpentry workshop series.

2012 VHDL Hasso Plattner Institute

Prepared course material for class on VHSIC Hardware Description Language.

Service

Reviewer for ACM CHI, IEEE VIS, TVCG, EuroVis, PacificVis, Computers & Graphics, HILDA, and DSIA. Program committee for HILDA 2018, HILDA 2019, and HILDA 2020, and program chair for HILDA 2022 and HILDA 2023 at SIGMOD. Organizer of DSIA 2018 and DSIA 2019 at VIS. Session chair at CHI 2019, VIS 2019, VIS 2020, VIS 2021, VIS 2023. Program committee at VIS 2020 and 2021. Organizing committee for VIS 2022, VIS 2023, VIS 2024. Maintainer of many open source projects. Apache Arrow committer.