Sam Wong

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HCI Researcher at Paul. G. Allen School, University of Washington.

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

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

Publications [Interactive Version]

Conference

C2
VizGroup: An AI-assisted Event-driven System for Collaborative Programming Learning Analytics
Xiaohang Tang, Sam Wong, Kevin Pu, Xi Chen, Yalong Yang, Yan Chen. UIST, 2024.
PDF Project
C1
The Impact of Group Discussion and Formation on Student Performance: An Experience Report in a Large CS1 Course
Tong Wu, Xiaohang Tang, Sam Wong, Xi Chen, Cliff Shaffer, Yan Chen. SIGCSE, 2025.
PDF Project

Journal

Book Chapter

Demo

Workshop

Thesis

Patents

Mar 2017

Database query for histograms

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Mar 2017

Difference visualization between data sets

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Mar 2017

Fast approximate results and slow precise results

Bolin Ding, Chi Wang, Danyel Fisher, Dominik Moritz

Student Mentoring

Talks [Interactive Version]

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.