About Me
Alisha Varma graduated this past May from the University of Maryland, College Park with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. During her time in undergrad, she worked as a Research Assistant in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and was involved in several other organizations like Technica, Hack4Impact, GirlsWhoCode, and Bitcamp.
About My Mentor
Dr. Leilani Battle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington, Seattle (previously at University of Maryland, College Park). She runs Battle Data Lab at the University of Maryland. Her research areas include visualization, HCI, big data analytics, and database systems
About My Project
The research project centers around measuring creativity. We intend to look into the relationship between creativity and insight generation during the exploratory visual analysis process. During this project, we will be conducting an experimental study to look at analysts’ creativity measures and insight generation process while interacting with various visualization tools. The goals of the project are to conduct an IRB approved experimental study with both video platform and crowdsourced participants, and analyze the results relating to creativity and insight to see if there is a correlation. The process will involve generating the IRB paperwork, creating the experiment platform, piloting the experiments, running both versions of the experiment, and analyzing the data. Weekly goals involve reading a couple of related journal/conference articles, a literature search, and weekly writing iterations on the different parts of an article draft.