Subramanian

Vanakkam! (That’s 'hello' in Tamil, my native tongue.)

I was a Research Assistant/PhD Candidate at Media Computing Group until end of 2020. As of 2022, I am working at devolo AG, Aachen, where I write software, help with UX, and analyze data.

My research is aimed at improving the workflows of data workers, who are non-professional data scientists. I use mainly qualitative methods to study how data workers prepare for and perform data science in their work. Based on my findings, I design, build, and validate software solutions to improve data workers' workflows. For an overview of my PhD, see here.

Administrative Roles

I used to manage the kitchen at i10. This role has been taken over by Oliver, see the Kitchen Overlord page.
I was the i10 librarian. This included maintaining the software for labeling books, maintaining publications, maintaining the CHI rankings page, and keeping the Hochschulbibliothek up to date. This role has been taken over by René, see the Librarian page.
I used to maintain the ARPen project along with Phil. My role has been taken over by René and Oliver.The handover instructions can be found on oliver: smb://oliver.hci.rwth-aachen.de/Public/Research%20Projects/ARPen/Documentation/Handover%20from%20Krishna (internal access).
For any questions about Designing Interactive Systems I, please contact Oliver or Marcel, who will be our TAs for the course offered in WS 2020/21.

Projects

TRACTUS

Bringing structure to data science

TRACTUS is an RStudio addin that groups source code into the hypotheses that they were used to test in order to improve data science workflow.

Paper at CHI 2020.

Understanding Data Science Programming IDEs

Computational Notebooks and Consoles

Many data scientists use computational notebooks due to the many benefits they offer, e.g., markdown support. However, scripts are still used across by many data scientists… or are they? What is the role of scripts and notebooks in the current toolbox of data workers? We investigated these questions in this project.

Paper at VL/HCC 2020.

StatWire

Visual statistical programming

StatWire is an IDE for R that integrates the traditional text-based editor with a visual data-flow editor to better support statistical programming.

Late-Breaking Work at CHI 2018.

StatPlayground

Learn statistics

StatPlayground is a web-based app that allows users to directly manipulate characteristics of data (e.g., mean, variance, outliers) through visualizations (e.g., box plot) and view the resulting effect on the inferential statistics (e.g., p-value, effect size) and vice versa.

Paper at INTERACT 2019 and a Late-Breaking Work at CHI 2017.

Statsplorer

Statistics simplified

Statsplorer is a software tool that allows users to do statistical analysis by interacting with visualizations. It guides the user to select appropriate statistical analysis tasks based on her research questions. It also prevents common statistical analysis mistakes and promotes understanding by collocating appropriate visualizations with statistical analysis results.

Paper at CHI 2015 and a Student Research Competition entry at CHI 2014.

ARPen

In-situ AR modeling

ARPen allows users to construct 3d models and freehand sketches in augmented reality by using a pen in mid-air.

Thesis Students

Student	Time Period	B.Sc./M.Sc.	Topic
Lukas Koschmieder	Dec. 2015–Jul. 2016	B.Sc.*	Utilizing Microsoft Word as a PRiME Documentation Processor – Detection and Visualization of PRiME Guideline Violations in Microsoft Word
Devashish Jasani	Jul. 2016–Feb. 2017	M.Sc.	Realizing Elastic Design Principles for User Exploration in Bayesian Analysis (in cooperation with SAP Labs)
Michael Ellers	Jul. 2016–Mar. 2017	B.Sc.	StatLets: Improving Statistical Analysis with R
Jeanine Bonot	Jan. 2017–Feb. 2019	M.Sc.	StatPlayground: Fine-level Control of InfoViz with Foreshadowing via Direct Manipulation
Johannes Maas	Mar. 2017–Aug. 2017	B.Sc.	StatWire: Visual Flow-Based Programming for Statistical Analysis (co-supervised by Prof. Chat Wacharamanotham, Univ. of Zurich)
Mariia Mentiu	Jun. 2017–Sep. 2017	B.Sc.*.	Evaluating Learning Analytics Prototypes for E-learning
Sahar Delavar	Jul., 2017–Mar. 2018	M.Sc.	In Situ Evaluation of Climate Control in Cars via a Mobile App
Yuliya Sergiyenko	Jan., 2018–Oct. 2018	M.Sc.	Investigating Statistical Analysis Workflows in HCI
Martin Huppertz	Apr. 2018–Aug. 2020	B.Sc.	Evaluating Guided Drawing Techniques in Handheld Augmented Reality
Asif Mayilli	May 2018–Feb. 2020	M.Sc.	Understanding How Tangibles Are Used for Data Sharing
Radu-Andrei Coanda	Jul. 2018–Feb. 2019	B.Sc.	Cheno: Computing Datasets from Inference Statistics
Ilya Zubarev	Aug. 2018–Mar. 2019	M.Sc.	Visual and Functional Aids to Support the Statistical Analysis Workflow
Anam Sohail	Jan. 2019–Dec. 2019	M.Sc.	Challenges in Recruiting Participants for Studies in HCI
Yue Hu	Feb. 2019–Aug. 2019	M.Sc.	Statistics in the Wild: How Practitioners Choose Statistical Procedures
Malte Meng	Oct. 2019–Jun. 2020	B.Sc.	StatHunt: Supporting Novice Researchers Seek Statistical Procedures
Johannes Maas	Dec. 2019–Sep. 2020	M.Sc.	Understanding and Supporting Analysis of Audio and Video (co-supervised by Prof. Jim Hollan, UCSD)
Jenny Reinhard	Feb. 2020–Sep. 2020	B.Sc.	Participants, Incentives, and User Studies: A Survey of CHI 2019 (co-supervised by Prof. Christian Remy, Aarhus Univ.)

*: As the second supervisor

Teaching

When?	What?
WS 2019/20	Designing Interactive Systems I Lecture TA and Lab Tutor; with Oliver Nowak
SS 2019	Media Computing Project Lab (in Bonn) Lab Tutor
WS 2018/19	Designing Interactive Systems I Lecture TA and Lab Tutor; with Adrian Wagner
SS 2018	Media Computing Project Lab (in Bonn) Lab Tutor
WS 2017/18	Designing Interactive Systems I Lecture TA and Lab Tutor; with Paulina Reijsmeijer
SS 2017	Media Computing Project Lab (in Bonn) Lab Tutor
WS 2016/17	Designing Interactive Systems I Lecture TA and Lab Tutor
SS 2016	Media Computing Project Lab (in Bonn) Lab Tutor
WS 2015/16	Designing Interactive Systems I Lecture TA and Lab Tutor; with Philipp Wacker
SS 2015	Media Computing Project Lab (in Bonn) Lab Tutor
WS 2014/15	Designing Interactive Systems I Lecture TA and Lab Tutor; with Christian Corsten

Publications

2022

Krishna Subramanian. Lowering the Barriers to Hypothesis-Driven Data Science. PhD Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, June 2022.

2021

Krishna Subramanian, Johannes Maas, Jan Borchers and James Hollan. From Detectables to Inspectables: Understanding Qualitative Analysis of Audiovisual Data. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2021, ACM, May 2021.

2020

Krishna Subramanian, Nur Hamdan and Jan Borchers. Casual Notebooks and Rigid Scripts: Understanding Data Science Programming. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC '20), IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, August 2020.

Krishna Subramanian, Johannes Maas and Jan Borchers. TRACTUS: Understanding and Supporting Source Code Experimentation in Hypothesis-Driven Data Science. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '20, pages 10, ACM, New York, NY, USA, April 2020.

2019

Krishna Subramanian, Jeanine Bonot, Radu A. Coanda and Jan Borchers. StatPlayground: A Sandbox for Learning Practical Statistics. In Human-Computer Interaction -- INTERACT 2019, pages 156–165, Springer International Publishing, Cham, September 2019.

Krishna Subramanian, Ilya Zubarev, Simon Voelker and Jan Borchers. Supporting Data Workers to Perform Exploratory Programming. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA '19, pages 6, ACM, New York, NY, USA, May 2019.

2018

Krishna Subramanian, Johannes Maas, Michael Ellers, Chat Wacharamanotham, Simon Voelker and Jan Borchers. StatWire: Visual Flow-based Statistical Programming. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA '18, pages LBW104:1–LBW104:6, ACM, New York, NY, USA, April 2018.

2017

Krishna Subramanian and Jan Borchers. StatPlayground: Exploring Statistics through Visualizations. In CHI '17: Extended Abstracts of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 401–404, ACM, New York, NY, USA, May 2017.

2015

Chat Wacharamanotham, Krishna Subramanian, Sarah Theres Völkel and Jan Borchers. Statsplorer: Guiding Novices in Statistical Analysis. In CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 2693–2702,New York, NY, USA, April 2015.

2014

Krishna Subramanian. VisiStat: Visualization-driven, Interactive Statistical Analysis. In CHI ’14: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 987—992,April 2014.

Krishna Subramanian. VisiStat: Visualization-driven, Interactive Statistical Analysis. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, March 2014.