About me
I was born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1986. My first school was Assumption College in Bangkok where I spent eleven memorable years. During high school, I was included in the Special Project for Outstanding Student (SPS), which allowed me to finish high school within two years instead of three.
To follow my interest in computer, I went to Faculty of Engineering,Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. In my sophomore year, I won the DTAC & Nokia iAwards, a national mobile software competition. In my junior and senior years, I was a member of Plasma-Z, a robot soccer team that won the RoboCup Thailand Championship and continued to the world stage by winning the third place from World Robocup 2006 in Bremen, Germany.
After receiving a Computer Engineering degree (with first-class honor) from Chulalongkorn University in 2007, I came to the U.S. to continue my study. I earned my Master degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2009. I decide to continued for a PhD and spent most of my time at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
Under the great supervision of Dr. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant, I finally received my PhD in 2012. My PhD dissertation is titled "Interactive Exploration of Temporal Event Sequences". The key contributions were novel approaches to visualize and search for event sequences. During these PhD years, I got opportunities to do internships at Microsoft Research and IBM Research, which resulted in several patents.
Following my graduation, I joined Twitter as a Data Visualization Scientist to make sense of one of the most fascinating and gigantic datasets in the world. My work ranges from internal dashboard design, visual analytics tools to public-facing visualizations. Notable work included company-wide dashboard for Experimentation Platform (Duck Duck Goose), advanced tools for visualizing log events and session analysis, and interactive.twitter.com.
I am current managing two teams at Airbnb: (1) Data Experience team that applies UI/UX design and data visualization for data tools. (2) Anomaly Detection team that enables multiple groups in the company to automatically monitor time-series data, such as business metrics.
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 Thailand. People from Taiwan call themselves Taiwanese.