Vidya Setlur is the senior director of Tableau Research. She leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists in areas including data visualization, multimodal interaction, applied ML, and NLP. She earned her doctorate in Computer Graphics in 2005 at Northwestern University. Prior to joining Tableau, she worked as a principal research scientist at the Nokia Research Center for 7 years.
Her personal research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing and computer graphics. Since joining Tableau Research in 2012, Vidya has worked on various projects involving data semantics and visual representation. She has been interested in exploring analytical conversation using natural language interaction. As part of productizing Tableau's natural language feature, Ask Data, she moved to engineering and was a manager on the Natural Language Team for a couple of years.