Alex Kale is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago. He earned his PhD in Information Science at the University of Washington in 2022.
Before coming to University of Chicago, Alex held a visiting research position at Northwestern University from 2020 through 2022. He earned a Master’s of Science in Information Science from the University of Washington in 2020 and a Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology, with minors in Music and Philosophy, also from the University of Washington in 2015.
Alex leads the Data Cognition Lab at the University of Chicago, focused on creating data visualization and analysis software that explicitly represents users’ cognitive processes around data.
Research
Focus Areas: Human Computer Interaction, Data Visualization
Alex Kale researches data visualization and human-computer interaction. He creates and investigates software tools for helping people reason with data and statistical models, especially in situations involving uncertainty. His work seeks to augment human statistical reasoning by providing new ways to interact with data and software tools that more explicitly represent the choices, rationales, values, caveats, and assumptions that underlie data analysis. Current interests include data exploration, model interpretability, causal inference, decision making, fairness, and uncertainty visualization.
