Frank Elavsky
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PhD Candidate at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Research Area
I design and build software systems for human interaction. My current work is situated on toolmaking at the intersection of data visualization and accessibility, making better frameworks and software tools for practitioners to make data visualizations accessible for people with disabilities. I hope to continue to design and build interfaces, infrastructures, and tools that enable everyone, including people with disabilities, to explore, explain, interrogate, and investigate data.
My 5-year vision after the completion of my PhD thesis continues my focus on tools as an intervention on human behavior. However, I will be integrating critical concerns for broader impacts of technical tools on society and our lived environments. My research agenda has three pillars: creation, critique, and care:
- On creation: I will contribute practical advancements in the state of the art in accessible data visualization tool development. I have made a career of building and co-designing useful tools that find purchase in working communities. I will strengthen this work moving forward, focusing especially on making accessibility work more accessible and scaling accessibility infrastructure.
- On critique: I will contribute humanistic and critical inquiry of tools and toolmaking, within the social context of disability. My agenda will not solely focus on optimistic production of technology, but also advance our understanding of the past harms, present limitations, and future challenges of the sociotechnical entanglement of tools and the construct of disability.
- On care: I will contribute theoretical and empirical knowledge of practitioner-tool relationships. I intend to investigate why tool-users and tool makers choose to care for, and not care for, some tools. On caring for, I will conduct longitudinal interview, co-design, and ethnographic work in the context of open-source software maintenance, specifically focusing on contexts of accessibility repair. On not-caring for, I intend to investigate, through qualitative expert interviews, preliminary research into why some practitioners respond to generative and agentic AI with disgust and refusal.
Positions
Education
Advised by Dominik Moritz and Patrick Carrington.
Thesis: (In progress) Tool-making as an Intervention on the Accessibility of Interactive Data Representations.
Current GPA: 4.04 / 4.0
Member of the Data Interaction Group and AXLE Lab.
GPA: 3.88 / 4.0, Magna Cum Laude
Advanced coursework on data visualization, video game physics, digital humanities archives, and software interfaces.
GPA: 3.88 / 4.0, Magna Cum Laude
Advanced coursework on post-colonialism, trauma theory, feminist semiotics, secularism, and the philosophy of play.
Publications [Interactive Version]
Conference
Book Chapter
Report/Article
Workshop Paper
Micro-paper
Poster
Patents
Notable Awards
($200,000) Thanks to our previous internal grant and collaboration, I helped our lab acquire additional gift funding from Adobe to continue our work.
($200,000) In partnership with Quansight Labs, I am listed as key personnel on a 2-year CZI EOSS 6 grant for making the Bokeh python visualization library more accessible. I am the leading consultant, advisor, auditor, and architect for the accessibility efforts of this grant.
($5,000) The Open Visualization Academy (OVA) provided me funding to prepare course materials for a free and open course on accessibility and visualization, to be offered as part of OVA's flagship curriculum on visualization.
($40,000) In partnership with internal individuals and teams at Adobe, we were awarded an internal grant for our work to make Adobe's data visualization tooling and analytical products and services more accessible for blind and low vision data workers.
($40,000) In partnership with Highsoft, we were awarded an internal grant for our work to investigate and research customization and personalization of data visualizations by individuals with disabilities.
(top 3 out of 31,000) I was nominated and then recognized on the shortlist for my work with the Data Visualization Society's community, fostering a space for folks to learn and connect regarding accessibility.
I was given awards for my outstanding review contributions to CHI 2022, 2023, and 2024 (a hat trick!) and 2x at UIST 2024.
My Masses in the Stellar Graveyard interactive data experience won NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Archive Research Center (HEASARC) Image of the Week Award.
My Masses in the Stellar Graveyard interactive data experience won Kantar's longlist.
My Quantifying Career Hot Streaks interactive data experience won Kantar's longlist.
Barry Barish's lecture prominently featured my figure on electromagnetic and gravitational wave detections of compact stellar objects.
($132,000 total, top 12, 5 years) Recurring, 60% scholarship awarded to a select group of 12 students who participate in a seminar with the Academic Dean on a semesterly graduate-level humanities, theology, or philosophy topic.
($40,000 total, top 10%, 4 times) Scholarship awarded to the top 10% of students each year, based on GPA.
($10,000) Scholarship and training expenses provided for students, scholars, and practitioners involved in organizing efforts in their communities.
($3,000) Grant awarded to active community organizers with promising projects.
Mentoring
Industry Professional Mentoring
Carnegie Mellon UniversityI mentored an industry professional who is working on making an infinite canvas tool, tldraw, more accessible. "Creative support tools" (CSTs) are notoriously hard to make accessible as they are largely visual-only. We explored the problem space, ideated, and developed prototypes.
Mentored:
- Taha Hassan
Undergraduate Mentoring
Carnegie Mellon UniversitySemester-long mentorships on the following topics: accessibility, machine-learning design, user interface design, software engineering, graph theory, assistive technology research.
Mentored:
- Ihita Mandal
- Chieri Nnadozie
- Iman Ouzzani
Graduate Student Mentoring
Carnegie Mellon UniversityI mentored a graduate student during their research-focused Master's in CS at CMU, exploring the space of machine learning descriptions of visualizations.
Mentored:
- Ihita Mandal
Undergraduate Mentoring
Northwestern UniversityI mentored an undergraduate student on two projects for the PI Sera Young, cleaning and visualizing refugee resettlement data as well as visualizing a world map of Young's Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) sites.
Mentored:
- Jun Hwa Lee (now at Meta)
Graduate Student Mentoring
Northwestern UniversityTaught graduate students in earth and astrophysical sciences professional, data-intensive skills for two summers. I personally worked with and mentored one PhD student fellow on projects related to their research.
Mentored:
- Boris Rösler (2017 and 2018 PhD Fellow)
Talks, Courses, Workshops [Interactive Version]
Softerware: Accessibility and Malleable Interfaces
Data Visualization and Accessibility
Tool-making, Data Science, and Accessibility
Software Structures of Assistive Technologies
Knowledge, Prediction, and Hope
Workshop on Web Frameworks
Accessibility and Play
Disability and Data Equity
Human-centered Machine Learning
Advanced Data Visualization with D3
Data Navigator
Philosophy of Design
Accessible Research
Chartability
Inclusive Data Experiences
Fireside Chat: Charts in Context
Fireside Chat: Accessibility in Data Visualization
Data Science Best Practices: Accessibility
Are Your Data Visualizations Excluding People?
Advanced Data Visualization and Accessibility on the Web
Visualizations for Multi-Dimensional Data
High-Density Model Visualization
Introduction to JavaScript
Introduction to Web Technology
Introduction to Visualization
How to Make Scientific Figures
Service
- Accessibility and Inclusion Co-Chair (2025), CHI Play.
- Associate Editor (2024 - Present), Journal of Interaction and Visualization (JoVI). Honored to be the first student editor!
- Peer Reviewer (2022 - Present), Reviewed a running total of 24 papers across ACM CHI, UIST, IEEE VIS, TAccess, and EuroVis.
- Co-founder and organizer (2020 - Present), DataVizA11y, a worldwide group of practitioners focused on accessibility in visualization.
- W3C Invited Expert (2021 - 2024), Accessible Internet Rich Applications (ARIA) Working Group, a working group for web accessibility standards.
- Student Volunteer (2023), ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference in Pittsburgh, PA.
- Volunteer Consultant (2020), City of San Francisco's Data Team, helped with a project to make COVID-19 dashboards more accessible.
- (Elected) Student Government (2013 - 2015), elected as Director of Spiritual Life ('13 - '14) and Student Body President ('14-'15).
- Community organizer (2012 - 2016), various, organizing at the local and institutional level for housing, safety, and student rights issues.
References
Dominik Moritz
Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Patrick Carrington
Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Ken Holstein
Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Tamara Munzner
Professor, Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Jennifer Mankoff
Richard E. Ladner Professor in Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington