About me
I was born and raised in Bangkok, Thailand. My childhood education from elementary to high school was at Assumption College in Bangkok. Here I was selected in the Special Project for Outstanding Student (SPS), which expedited the typical 3 years high school program into 2 years.
Following my interest in computer, I joined the Computer Engineering program at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. In my 2nd year, I won the DTAC & Nokia iAwards, a national mobile software competition. In my 3rd and 4th years, I was a member of Plasma-Z, a robot soccer team that won the RoboCup Thailand Championship and the third place from World Robocup 2006 in Bremen, Germany.
After finishing the undergraduate program (with 1st-class honor) in 2007, I moved to USA for Master and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Under the supervision of Dr. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant at Human-Computer Interaction Lab, I finally received PhD in 2012 with dissertation titled “Interactive Exploration of Temporal Event Sequences”. The key contributions were novel approaches to visualize and search for event sequences.
During the PhD years, I had internships at Microsoft Research and IBM Research, which resulted in several patents.
After graduation, I joined Twitter as a Data Scientist to make sense of one of the most fascinating and gigantic datasets in the world. My work ranged from internal dashboard design, visual analytics tools to public-facing visualizations. Selected work included company-wide tool for Experimentation (Duck Duck Goose), advanced tools for visualizing log events and session analysis, and public-facing visualizations on interactive.twitter.com.
My next adventure was at Airbnb where I rearchitected the data visualization features of Apache Superset, an open-source Business Intelligence platform. I then became Engineering Manager of: (1) Data Experience team that applies UI/UX design and data visualization for data tools. (2) Anomaly Detection team that enables other teams to automatically monitor time-series data, such as business metrics.
After a few years in management, I decided to spend more time on technical challenges again and am now working on Minerva, Airbnb's metric layer, responsible for all metric authoring and maintenance experience.
Awards
Best Paper Honorable Mention at IEEE VIS 2020 for the paper "Encodable: Configurable Grammar for Visualization Components"
Best Reviewer Award for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG 2017)
Winner of #BestWorstViz contest held by @visualisingdata
Winner of InformationIsBeautiful Awards Data Visualization Challenge "Money Panic" in the interactive category
Greg Harrington Award for Excellence in Visualization Research from the National Academy of Sciences Transportation Research Board (TRB)
2nd Runner-Up in World RoboCup 2006 Bremen
Winner of RoboCup Thailand Championship 2006
Thailand Representative in World RoboCup 2005 Osaka
Winner of "Information" Awards in DTAC&Nokia iAwards
Winner of "Webroon.com" Contest held by CS Internet
Certificates
- Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD)
- Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)
- Thailand Information Technology Engineers Examinations (ITEE)
Skills
Hobbies
Trivia
- Many people are frustrated by my long last name. The correct pronunciation is "Wong-su-pa-sa-wat". (The "h" in "pha" is silent.)
- Thai people are not from Taiwan 🇹🇼. I am from Bangkok, Thailand 🇹🇭.