Bio

Fernanda B. Viégas is a computational designer whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of information visualization. She is a is a co-leader, with Martin Wattenberg, of Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group in Cambridge, MA.

Before joining Google, she and Wattenberg founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. Prior to Flowing Media, they led IBM's Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes, an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis.

Before joining IBM, Viégas's research at the MIT Media Lab focused on the visualization of online communities. She is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories, email archives, and Wikipedia activity. Viégas's interest in the stories that people tell about these archives led to a series of visualizations of personal, emotionally-charged data.

Her artistic visualizations have been exhibited in venues such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Viégas holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the Media Lab at MIT. She is Brazilian and misses the year-round warm weather in Rio de Janeiro where she grew up.

 

For more information
Fast Company, nominated one of the Most Influential Women in Tech, 2010.
Terra, profile of me in Portuguese, 2010.
Revista Época, profile in Portuguese 2010.
TEDx São Paulo presentation, video, 2009.[English subtitles]
CNN article on visualization, 2008.
New York Times article on Many Eyes, 2008.
Folha de S. Paulo, interview with me in Porgutuese, 2008.




Outside links
HINT.FM
Flowing Media
Visual Communication Lab
Media Lab work


Twitter
@viegasf