Matthew Kay

About

Matthew Kay is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of Computer Science and Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His research focuses on human-computer interaction and information visualization, with specific interests in uncertainty visualization, personal health informatics, and the design of human-centered tools for data analysis. His work is supported by multiple NSF awards and has earned several best paper awards across venues such as CHI, InfoVis, UbiComp, and MobileHCI. Kay co-directs the Midwest Uncertainty Collective and is the author of the R packages tidybayes and ggdist, which are used for visualizing Bayesian statistical model output and uncertainty.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Geography
• Environmental health
• Cartography
• Statistics
• Demography
• Medicine
• Virology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• What University Students Learn In Visualization Classes

  IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics · 2024-09-11 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  As a step towards improving visualization literacy, this work investigates how students approach reading visualizations differently after taking a university-level visualization course. We asked students to verbally walk through their process of making sense of unfamiliar visualizations, and conducted a qualitative analysis of these walkthroughs. Our qualitative analysis found that after taking a visualization course, students engaged with visualizations in more sophisticated ways: they were mor…

  PublisherDOI

• AVEC: An Assessment of Visual Encoding Ability in Visualization Construction

  2025-04-24 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• More Forecasts, More (Decision) Problems: How Uncertainty Representations for Multiple Forecasts Impact Decision Making

  2025-04-25 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Users often have access to multiple forecasts regarding an event.Different forecasts incorporate different assumptions and epistemic information.A growing body of work argues against decisionmaking solely based on expected utility maximisation strategies in multiple forecasts scenarios, in favour of other strategies such as the maximin expected utility.In this work, we compare two different approaches for depicting epistemic uncertainty-ensembles (a direct representation of multiple forecasts) a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tasks and Telephones: Threats to Experimental Validity due to Misunderstandings of Visualisation Tasks and Strategies Position Paper

  2024-10-14 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Empirical studies in visualisation often compare visual representations to identify the most effective visualisation for a particular visual judgement or decision making task. However, the effectiveness of a visualisation may be intrinsically related to, and difficult to distinguish from, individual-level factors such as visualisation literacy. Complicating matters further, visualisation literacy itself is not a singular intrinsic quality, but can be a result of several distinct challenges that…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Through a Live Elections Dashboard, Darkly: Managing Expectations and Trust in Progressive Vote Counting During the 2024 U.S. Election

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Validating and Communiciating Model-Based Approaches for Data Visualization Ability Assessment

  NSF · $239k · 2018–2021

• CHS: Small: Developing a Probabilistic Grammar of Graphics for Flexible Uncertainty Visualization

  NSF · $500k · 2019–2021

• CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Validating and Communiciating Model-Based Approaches for Data Visualization Ability Assessment

  NSF · $122k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Matthew J. Gadlage

  Naval Surface Warfare Center

  31 shared

• Abhraneel Sarma

  Northwestern University

  31 shared

• Adam R. Duncan

  Naval Sea Systems Command

  30 shared

• Jessica Hullman

  Northwestern University

  28 shared

• Michael Correll

  Northeastern University

  22 shared

• Xiaoying Pu

  Northeastern University

  22 shared

• Véronique Ferlet-Cavrois

  European Space Research and Technology Centre

  18 shared

• Fumeng Yang

  16 shared

Education

• PhD, Computer Science and Engineering

  University of Washington

  2016

Awards & honors

• Multiple NSF awards
• Best paper awards across human-computer interaction and info…

Similar researchers at Northwestern University

• Tobin J. Marksh-176
• Joseph Hupph-171
• James D Thomash-160