Vidya Setlur is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and continues to collaborate with Tableau Research. Her research lies at the intersection of human-AI interaction, data visualization, and natural language processing, with a focus on helping people interact with and make sense of data through conversational and multimodal interfaces. Her work draws on information retrieval, human perception, and cognitive science to design, prototype, and evaluate novel ways of engaging with data and intelligent systems.
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.