Hi, I am

Abhraneel
Sarma.

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Northwestern University, advised by Professor Matthew Kay and Professor Jessica Hullman.

Broadly—I am interested in studying how people make sense of uncertainty in typical data analysis pipeline; this spans data quality issues, ambiguity over how data should be analysed (both in terms of data processing and modeling), and how results should be interpreted.

Specifically—I have developed tools which help analysts to specify the uncertainty in their data analysis process itself (the multiverse R library), as well as visualise the results of such specification uncertainty (which I like to refer to as possibilistic uncertainty, but also referred to by statisticians epistemic uncertainty). I have also conducted studies to understand how users interpret uncertainty information in missing data contexts, and how we can improve decision making during in exploratory data analysis in multiple comparisons scenarios.

CV

Publications

Odds and Insights: Decision Quality in Visual Analytics Under Uncertainty
Abhraneel Sarma, Xiaoying Pu, Yuan Cui, Eli T Brown, Michael Correll and Matthew Kay
CHI 2024 ● PDF ● OSF

Milliways: Taming Multiverses through Principled Evaluation of Data Analysis Paths
Abhraneel Sarma, Kyle Hwang, Jessica Hullman and Matthew Kay
CHI 2024 ● PDF ● OSF

multiverse: Multiplexing Alternative Data Analyses in R Notebooks
Abhraneel Sarma, Alex Kale, Michael Moon, Nathan Taback, Fanny Chevalier, Jessica Hullman and Matthew Kay
CHI 2023 ● BEST PAPER HONORABLE MENTION ● PDF ● OSF

Evaluating the Use of Uncertainty Visualisations for Imputations of Data Missing At Random in Scatterplots
Abhraneel Sarma, Shunan Guo, Jane Hoffswell, Ryan Rossi, Fan Du, Eunyee Koh and Matthew Kay
VIS 2022 ● BEST PAPER HONORABLE MENTION ● PDF ● OSF

Prior Setting In Practice: Strategies and rationales used in choosing prior distributions for Bayesian analysis
Abhraneel Sarma and Matthew Kay
CHI 2020 ● PDF ● GITHUB

Increasing the transparency of research papers with Explorable Multiverse Analyses
Pierre Dragicevic, Yvonne Jansen, Abhraneel Sarma, Matthew Kay, and Fanny Chevalier
CHI 2019 ● BEST PAPER AWARD ● PDF ● GITHUB ● OSF

Projects

The Effect of Explanatory Narratives and Exploratory Interactivity on learning through recall
Abhraneel Sarma and Matthew Kay
Master's Thesis Project ● 2018

Visualizing Inter-generational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality
Involved in developing the visualization (D3.js and reGL) and exploratory statistical modelling of the data.

Courses

I've been involved in organising the following courses and tutorials as an instructor (this is a lecture series with rolling instructors):

Transparent Practices for Quantitative Empirical Research
Chat Wacharamanotham, Fumeng Yang, Xiaoying Pu, Abhraneel Sarma and Lace Padilla
VIS 2023
CHI 2023
CHI 2022

Contact

abhraneel [at] u.northwestern.edu
github
twitter