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by Naracion 3382 days ago
As another designer + researcher with a varied background and an interest in data viz as well as ML, I am super interested in this as a potential contributor. I have experience creating an interactive visualization interface for simple ML algorithms (which has been used by professors in the life sciences department to understand / get a new perspective on what's happening). I would LOVE to be able to be involved with Distill.

I have actually been meaning to write a paper on my findings and have been looking for journals to write for. However it doesn't quite "fit" with most journals. Distill looks like it's more catered to "professional" machine learning people, at least for now. Is there any way that somebody with my background (design+data viz+development+interest and curiosity to learn ML) could be involved with Distill?

1 comments

> Is there any way that somebody with my background (design+data viz+development+interest and curiosity to learn ML) could be involved with Distill?

Absolutely. We know a number of leading ML researchers who would love to publish papers as Distill articles but don't have the design/data vis skills. We'd like to facilitate collaborations which would lead to data vis people co-authoring cutting edge research papers.

This is very exciting. How are you looking at facilitating these collaborations? Will there be a listing of sorts, where, say, ML researchers would say "I need a dataviz guy" and then dataviz specialists can apply, almost like a job (or rather more like matchmaking I guess--bad analogy)?

Or would said facilitation be done by the admins / editors / steering committee? If so, then how do you plan on finding dataviz people? I'm asking this in particular because I would imagine that people who have ML findings to talk about would probably contact you ("I researched such and such, and found such and such. Now I would love to publish in Distill"). But I wonder if data visualization specialists would do the same thing. Contacting with "hey, I love data viz, would love to collaborate with somebody looking for one" feels a little inappropriate to me.

Thoughts?