Why does everyone in the US (or at least South Bay) dress like they are about to go on a hike?

The Vega-Altair team is pleased to announce the release of version 6.0.0. Check out the release at github.com/vega/altair/...

I'll present our work on Embedding Atlas (apple.github.io/embedding-at...) in the @ieeevis.bsky.social session "VIS Short Papers: Explorations in Abstract and Physical Spaces" in Room 1.14 after lunch.

I'm at VIS this week. Come and say hi.

today we landed a @svelte.dev feature i'm pretty stoked about — we call it 'forking', and it lets you run state changes offscreen and later choose whether to commit them (e.g. user hovers on a link, preload data in case they click) - docs svelte.dev/docs/svelte/... - demo svelte.dev/playground/a...

Typst 0.14 adds accessible PDFs so now is really the time to jump on it!

While providing tech support for my FIL: FIL: What's that screen? ME: The terminal. You should never use it. FIL: Never? ME: So you know how I'm allowed to watch you open the electrical panel and swap out breakers, but I'm not allowed to ever open up it myself? FIL: Ah! I understand, thank you.

Before (2012) / After (2025) Rue le Vau, Paris 20. The change here is so radical that perceiving the photos as aligned is difficult (see the orange building and the trees on the left). In 2024, this section was converted into a school street with a bike lane running through the greenery.

Zürich has passed parking reform similar to what Halifax Council has been debating this year. Residents of Zürich will pay parking fees based on the weight of their car. A goals of this reform is to reduce the number of large SUVs in the city and thus use public space more fairly and sustainably.🧵

A huge thank you to co-authors @fredhohman.bsky.social, @domoritz.de, @jeffreybigham.com, @kenholstein.bsky.social, and Mary Beth Kery! This work was done during my summer internship w/ Apple AIML, and I’m thankful to work with this wonderful team :) arxiv.org/abs/2409.18203 #UIST25 talk: Wed 11am!

LLM safety work often reasons over high-level policies (be helpful & polite), but must tackle on-the-ground cases (unsolicited money advice when stocks are mentioned). This can feel like driving on an unfamiliar road guided by a generic driver’s manual instead of a map. We introduce: Policy Maps 🗺️

It fells like too much of US politics depends on an honor system rather than clear separation of power.

🚨#datavis Job alert 🚨 Fancy working with us in London as a researcher using @observablehq.com Plot for accessible #datavis? To support people with language disability in the use of data visualization for everyday decision making. www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/about/jobs/a...

Feels surreal to have professional milestones amidst current events, but I'm sharing for folks who still want to learn about accessibility in visualization. Back in June I spoke at @datavizsociety.bsky.social's Outlier about "softerware" (below) and now our paper has been officially accepted! 🎉🎉

github.com/vega/altair hit 10k ⭐️ on GitHub recently. Congrats to the Altair team and the amazing community.

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Please use timeful.app 📆 when getting people's availability. Ty!

🎆 Say hello to Transit 6.0! 🎆 It’s our love letter to public transportation — the brightest, boldest, and best version of ourselves yet 🌟

I used AI to take a bunch of pictures of the movie list on a flight and make me a table with ratings before the flight so I can be strategic about what to watch.

Did something happen?

www.nytimes.com/interactive/... We updated our rent vs. buy calculator.

🚀 We've just open-sourced Embedding Atlas – a tool for exploring large embedding spaces through rich, interactive visualizations 📊.

I'm hiring a researcher in my team at Apple. Please apply at jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

The data vis project "Mosaic: An Architecture for Linking Databases and Scalable Interactive Visualizations" received a SIGMOD Best Demo Runner Up award at the ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data in Berlin, Germany. Congrats to the Mosaic team on this recognition! 📊🎉

Today we published a technical report on the updated Apple Foundation Language models announced at WWDC. Check it out at machinelearning.apple.com/research/app... (which also links to the updated blog post).

My favorite part is that it lends itself to a really nice implementation. Each sweep shades as it goes, touching each pixel exactly once (twice, with antialiasing), and you can pack it all into a single texture: red/blue=normal vectors for relief shading, green=ambient occlusion, alpha=shadow.

Striking example showing that stacked area charts can be tricky to read.

How do language models track mental states of each character in a story, often referred to as Theory of Mind? We reverse-engineered how LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct handles a belief-tracking task and found something surprising: it uses mechanisms strikingly similar to pointer variables in C programming!

New incredible images from an incredible telescope just dropped.

Wow! It's a great honor to receive this Information is Beautiful Award. Thanks to @datawrapper.de for letting me inspire people. And thanks to everyone else who's contributing to the lovely #dataviz community! Find all #IIBAwards winners here: www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/news/680-ann...

I'm excited to be at @sigmod2025.bsky.social (and HILDA) next week in Berlin. I haven't been to SIGMOD in a while so please say hello and tell me abut the cool things that have happened in database land.

It's on! In its 8th year, the original VISxAI workshop wants your contributions for explaining ML/AI/GenAI principles. Please consider to submit. Deadline: July 30 webpage: visxai.io #ML #AI #GenAI #Visualization

New JavaScript linter from the folks who build vite.

You can use Apple's Foundation Models in apps: developer.apple.com/documentatio.... There are a bunch of updates to the base model which you can learn about at machinelearning.apple.com/research/app.... We also released new Human Interface Guidelines for Gen AI: developer.apple.com/design/human....

Swift Charts is coming to the third dimension 📊! developer.apple.com/videos/play/...

what's old is new again

WWDC always feels like Christmas. So awesome to finally talk about the things we have been working and to learn what colleagues at Apple built. 6/5 ⭐️!

Smells like a campfire in Pittsburgh now.

📢 We are hosting a DuckDB meetup in Berlin during the week of the SIGMOD conference. 📍 The meetup will take place on June 26 (Thursday) south of the Tiergarten and will feature talks by Amine Mhedhbi, David Justen and dltHub! 📝 If you plan to attend, please register at duckdb.org/events/2025/...

Better world maps for mobile! Despite years of mobile-first design, there’s been little experimentation in this area. So we designed our own at NZZ – and validated it in a large user study. Summary of the paper: jonasoesch.ch/articles/the... 1/3

Meet @frank.computer , PhD Candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. Frank will deliver a talk at #Outlier2025: “Thinking of 'Softerware:' Re-imagining Data Visualizations as Malleable Interfaces” Explore the agenda: www.accelevents.com/e/outlier-20... #dataviz #datavisualization

My colleague Nik’s fall class

so many cool accessibility features for your Apple devices were just announced! … accessibility continues to lead in imagining new ways to use your devices, sensors, and machine learning to make the world more accessible www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

Congestion pricing was designed to finance more than $15 billion in critical transit upgrades in New York City. Those investments will take years. But the parallel changes at street level are already apparent. Here’s what we know so far. nyti.ms/4mbuGg0

this course website on Augmenting Intelligence by @kenholstein.bsky.social is amazing -- coaugmentation.com

At #chi2025 this year, see our group's latest: a projectional editor for augmenting math formulas, and a study of augmented AI-generated texts. Look out for these faces! Jeff, @hitakam.bsky.social, and I are excited to reconnect with old friends and make new ones.

Not just running fast, but writing fast. So exciting!

I’m at @chi.acm.org 🌸 next week so come and say hi 👋. My group, the @dig.cmu.edu at @hcii.cmu.edu, has a few presentation you don’t want to miss dig.cmu.edu/2025/03/21/c.... We will also have awesome folks from Apple 🍎 in Yokohama. Check out machinelearning.apple.com/updates/appl....

Spent a few late nights in the office to get this one over the finish line but happy that it simplifies bundling and how we distribute Vega and Vega-Lite.