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Hi, welcome to the specialization and
information visualization.

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My name is Enrico Bertini and I am your
main instructor for the specialization.

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I am an associate professor at
the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and

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I have been doing research and teaching
in this area for many, many years.

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I am also the co-host of a popular
podcast called Data Stories,

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where I talk together with Moritz Stefaner
about data visualization and

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anything related to data.

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So, my guess is that if you're
watching this video, you've probably

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heard of visualization, and
you've also noticed that in recent years,

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it grew really,
really a lot in popularity.

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So some of the areas
where you may have seen

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visualization growing are data journalism.

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So there are lots of newspapers
that produce amazing graphics

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like The New York Times, Washington Post,
Financial Times and so on.

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Another area is vendors and products,
as you saw there are lots of new products.

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For instance, Tableau, Qlik,
and open source projects.

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Very popular ones like ggplot2, D3,

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and a lot of new ones
coming basically every day.

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There is also a very thriving
scientific community with new

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conferences coming up every year.

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Lots of publications at research
labs growing all around the world.

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And finally, in data science,
visualization plays a very,

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very major role.

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And some of the major startups and

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companies out there tend to have
strong data visualization groups.

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Notable examples are Uber, Netflix,
Capital One, and many others.

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So, typically persons who are trying
to learn visualization, or are learning

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visualization skills, can use these
skills in many, many different areas.

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So, as I said, in data science,
in data journalism.

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You can also become
an independent designer,

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there are several very successful ones,
and in general as an analyst or as

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a scientist you can use data visualization
skills in many many different ways.

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So, what all these areas have in
common when we talk about the use of

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visualization is the basic
idea of transforming data into

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something that enhances the comprehension
of what is described by the data.

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And there is kind of need
a little bit of everywhere, and

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the reason why this is growing and
growing is because the availability of

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data has been growing and
growing in recent years.

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So that's what is happening here.

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So let's switch to talking about,
specifically about the specialization.

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Okay, the main goal of the specialization
is to teach you how to design, evaluate

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and develop interactive visualizations
to help people generate insights and

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then communicate these insights to other
people as effectively as possible.

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That's the main goal of the course.

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And we try to strike a balance
between practical skills, but

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also very useful theoretical knowledge.

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The knowledge that is going to stay
with you no matter what changes

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in technology are going to come in
the future, very important foundations.

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So in the course we have
a lot of practical examples,

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we tried as much as possible to use
real-world data sets and cases.

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We also try to provide the cutting edge
knowledge coming from research and

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latest sources.

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And we also have a lot of practical
programming skills, especially,

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in one of the courses that is
totally focus on programming.

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So, we have four main courses
in the specialization.

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The first one is Introduction
to Information Visualization.

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That's a broad introduction and
it's meant to give you the foundations,

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the main foundations behind the discipline
of Information Visualization.

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In the second course, we talk about mainly
Applied Perception For Visualization.

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These are very basic skills that you need
in order to understand how visualization

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works and
how humans perceive visualizations.

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Then we have the third course that is
completely focused on programming.

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And here we are going to teach you how
to program interactive visualizations

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using the very popular
D3 JavaScript library, okay.

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This is very important because you want to
be able to build interactive visualization

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in practice and
D3 is by far the most popular language.

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Finally, we have an advanced course
at the end that talks about,

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introduces the main advanced techniques
that exist in visualization that

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go beyond the basic techniques that
we introduce in the first course.

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And we also talk a lot more
about interactive methods.

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How to make visualizations interactive.

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Why and when to make them interactive, and

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how to do it in practice
through programming.

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So, the specialization
has five main objectives.

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The first one is to teach you
how to use graphs appropriately,

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how to choose the right graph for
a given problem.

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The second one is to teach you how
to evaluate visualization designs,

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whether they come from your own work or
from other people's work.

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A very important skill.

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We also teach you how to innovate.

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How do you come up with new visualization
methods or techniques that is needed for

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something specific you need for
your work or for

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very specific needs of a new project?

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That's very important.

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Of course, we also introduce,

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we also talk about how to code
information visualization.

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Which is exactly what I just said
that is covered in course three.

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And finally, an overarching goal
is to teach you how to go from

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the specification of a problem
to transforming this problem and

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the data into a working
information visualization.

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So that's all for now, and
I wish you a good journey

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into the specialization in
information visualization.