AI, Dashboards, and Human Decisions: A Conversation with Melanie Tory

About this episode

A conversation with Melanie Tory about the real-world use of dashboards and AI in healthcare.

In this week's episode, I talk with Melanie Tory, Professor of the Practice at Northeastern University, about how people actually use dashboards in the real world — and why that use often looks very different from what designers intend. Her research reveals that dashboards frequently serve as a starting point for accessing data rather than tools for answering questions directly, with many users simply exporting data to Excel to do their real analytical work. We also explore her work on AI-enabled healthcare systems designed to help clinicians monitor patient risk in intensive care units, including how to visualize uncertainty in ways that busy medical teams can process quickly. And we close with a look at her emerging research on how people are beginning to use generative AI tools for data visualization tasks. It's a thought-provoking conversation about the gap between the tools we build and the ways people actually work with data. Subscribe to the PolicyViz Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Keywords: data visualization, dashboards, dashboard design, dashboard usability, data analysis workflows, Tableau dashboards, Power BI dashboards, human data interaction, Melanie Tory…

People in this episode

Host: PolicyViz Podcast

Guest: Melanie Tory

Topics covered

• data visualization
• dashboards
• AI in healthcare
• data analysis workflows
• human data interaction

Keywords

• data visualization
• dashboards
• dashboard design
• data analysis workflows
• AI-enabled healthcare

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Northeastern University

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