Contact Info

Email: nyau [at] stat [dot] ucla [dot] edu

Advisor: Mark Hansen

Recent Publications

• N. Yau. Seeing Your Life in Data, Beautiful Data. O'Reilly Media, Inc., July 2009.
• N. Yau and J. Schneider. Self-Surveillance, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Vol. 35, No. 5 June/July 2009, 24-30.
• M. Mun, S. Reddy, K. Shilton, N. Yau, J. Burke, D. Estrin, M. Hansen, E. Howard, R. West, P. Boda. PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, as a Platform for Participatory Sensing Systems Research, MobiSys, June 2009.
• S. Reddy, G. Chen, B. Fulkerson, S. J. Kim, U. Park, N. Yau, J. Cho, M. Hansen, and J. Heideman. Sensor-Internet Share and Search: Enabling Collaboration of Citizen Scientists, Data Sharing and Interoperability on the World-wide Sensor Web, IPSN 2007. April 2007.
• G. Chen, N. Yau, M. Hansen, D. Estrin, 2007. Sharing Sensor Network Data, CENS Technical Report. Number 71. March 2007.
• K. Chang, N. Yau, M. Hansen, D. Estrin, 2006. SensorBase.org – A Centralized Repository to Slog Sensor Network Data, DCOSS / Euro-American Workshop on Middleware for Sensor Networks Proceedings.
• R. Gould and N. Yau. The Journal of Technological Innovations in Statistics Education, Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter. Volume 17, Number 1. June 2006.

Coursework

• Applied Probability
• Regression Analysis: Model Building, Fitting, and Criticism
• Numerical Linear Algebra and Random Numbers
• Large Sample Theory, Including Resampling
• Advanced Modeling and Data Mining
• Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Optimization
• Function Estimation and Modeling
• Site-specifics

Worth a Look

• FlowingData   My blog on stat, visualization, and how data is everywhere you go.
• SensorBase   An application Gong Chen and me developed to publish and share sensor data.
• Teaching Innovations in Statistics Education (TISE)
• CENS   The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. A whole lot of people, a whole lot of research.
• UCLA Statistics   General information and news on one of the best stat departments ever.

Recent News

• Beautiful Data is now on the shelves! The book is a collection of articles from data scientists and their experiences with data. I was fortunate enough to write a chapter for the book: Seeing Your Life in Data. All proceeds from the book go to the Sunlight Foundation and Creative Commons. 8.10.09

• I took a step back from code and opened up R and Adobe Illustrator to create Progress: A Graphical Report On the State of the World. It was later seen by thousands as it hit the front page of Digg soon after posting it to FlowingData. 3.3.09

• your.flowingdata, an online application to monitor your habits and record data with Twitter, is now up and running (invitation-only). 12.3.08

• PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, is live! How do you affect the environment, and what effects does the environment have on you? 5.12.08

• 
  My statistics and data visualization blog, FlowingData, has recently gained some steam and grown into much more than I intended, which is a good thing. 2.26.08

• I had the opportunity to work with designers Miguel Cabanzo, Iman Moradi, and Monica Sanchez at the Visualizar workshop where we built a visualization for migration data. 11.28.07

• I just finished an awesome summer internship at The New York Times graphics department. Had the privilege of learning about data visualization and its role in journalism from the best in the business. 9.21.07

A Little About Me

I'm originally from Fresno and did my undergrad at Berkeley. After that, I ended up in graduate school at UCLA, and now, I'm in Buffalo, New York working on my dissertation. Yes. Buffalo.

Research Interests

My main research interests are in data visualization or more specifically, social data visualization, self-surveillance, personal data, and data sharing.

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

John W. Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis. 1977.