Frank Elavsky

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PhD Candidate at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

https://www.frank.computer
fje@cmu.edu
@frank.computer

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

2024–2025 Adobe (Remote)
Visualization and Accessibility R&D (contract)
2024 Highsoft Vik, Norway
Accessibility R&D (contract/intern), Highcharts Accessibility
2022–2023 Apple Pittsburgh, PA
Data Interaction R&D (contract/intern), AX Visualization Team
2021–2023 Fizz Studio Pittsburgh, PA
Senior Research Scientist, Accessibility Standards, Industry Consulting
2017–2018 Northwestern University Evanston, IL
Data Visualization Specialist, Research Computing Services
2016–2017 Acumen LLC Burlingame, CA
Data Visualization and Policy Analyst, Data Visualization Team
2015 Clemson University Clemson, SC
Undergraduate Research Assistant, National Science Foundation REU Site

Education

2021–Present Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA

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.

2011–2016 B.S. in Computer Information Systems, Trinity Lutheran College Everett, WA

GPA: 3.88 / 4.0, Magna Cum Laude
Advanced coursework on data visualization, video game physics, digital humanities archives, and software interfaces.

2011–2016 B.A. in Theology and Philosophy, Trinity Lutheran College Everett, WA

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

P1
Digital Wrangling and Visualization for Correspondence Projects
Frank Elavsky, Gabriel Hankins, Jill Gemmill. XSEDE 15, 2015.

Patents

Notable Awards

2025–2026 Accessible Visualization Tools and Systems Adobe

($200,000) Thanks to our previous internal grant and collaboration, I helped our lab acquire additional gift funding from Adobe to continue our work.

2024–2026 Accessible Interactive Data Visualizations Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

($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.

2025 Accessibility and Visualization Course Development Open Visualization Academy

($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.

2024–2025 Access and Inclusion for Blind and Low Vision People in Data Products, Services, and Tools Adobe

($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.

2024 Accessibility and Personalization Research and Development Highsoft

($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.

2023 Impactful Community Leadership, shortlist Information is Beautiful Awards

(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.

2022–2024 Outstanding Review ACM CHI

I was given awards for my outstanding review contributions to CHI 2022, 2023, and 2024 (a hat trick!) and 2x at UIST 2024.

2019 Image of the Week NASA

My Masses in the Stellar Graveyard interactive data experience won NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Archive Research Center (HEASARC) Image of the Week Award.

2018 Kantar's IIB Longlist Kantar's Information is Beautiful Awards

My Masses in the Stellar Graveyard interactive data experience won Kantar's longlist.

2018 Kantar's IIB Longlist Kantar's Information is Beautiful Awards

My Quantifying Career Hot Streaks interactive data experience won Kantar's longlist.

2017 Featured Graphic in the 2017 Nobel Lectureship on Physics

Barry Barish's lecture prominently featured my figure on electromagnetic and gravitational wave detections of compact stellar objects.

2011–2016 Dean's Circle Scholarship Trinity Lutheran College

($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.

2011–2016 Presidential Honors Trinity Lutheran College

($40,000 total, top 10%, 4 times) Scholarship awarded to the top 10% of students each year, based on GPA.

2013–2014 Organizing For Mission Cohort ELCA

($10,000) Scholarship and training expenses provided for students, scholars, and practitioners involved in organizing efforts in their communities.

2013 Community Improvement Grant Forum for Theological Exploration

($3,000) Grant awarded to active community organizers with promising projects.

Mentoring

2024

Industry Professional Mentoring

Carnegie Mellon University

I 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:

2022,2024

Undergraduate Mentoring

Carnegie Mellon University

Semester-long mentorships on the following topics: accessibility, machine-learning design, user interface design, software engineering, graph theory, assistive technology research.

Mentored:

2022–2023

Graduate Student Mentoring

Carnegie Mellon University

I mentored a graduate student during their research-focused Master's in CS at CMU, exploring the space of machine learning descriptions of visualizations.

Mentored:

2018

Undergraduate Mentoring

Northwestern University

I 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:

2017–2018

Graduate Student Mentoring

Northwestern University

Taught 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:

Talks, Courses, Workshops [Interactive Version]

Softerware: Accessibility and Malleable Interfaces

Outlier, Miami, FL
CSUN, Anaheim, CA

Data Visualization and Accessibility

PyCon, Pittsburgh, PA
Global Accessibility Awareness Day, by Highsoft
University of Virginia
University of Michigan
CSUN, Anaheim, CA
SIGCSE, Workshop on Accessibility, Pittsburgh, PA
Carnegie Mellon University
IEEE VIS Workshop on Accessible Data Visualization
(State of the Art talk) IEEE VIS Workshop on Accessible Data Visualization
Data Visualization Society, Reader's Club
Carnegie Mellon University
Highsoft HQ, Vik i Sogn, Norway
AccessU
T-Mobile Accessibility Summit
Carnegie Mellon University
Accessibility Tableau User Group
Graphic Hunters
Northwestern University
NACIS
AccessFest
Visualizing Knowledge, Aalto University
Maryland Institute College of Art
DataViz DC Meetup
IRE-NICAR
Northwestern University
Observable HQ
IEEE Vis, VisInPractice
University of Cincinnati
University of Washington
Linkedin Learning
PolicyViz
Carnegie Mellon University
Data Viz Today
Accessibility Camp Bay Area
Tableau World
NoVA UX Meetup
IRE-NICAR
CIDE, Mexico City
Maryland Institute College of Art
Knowbility

Tool-making, Data Science, and Accessibility

HCIL, UMD
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University

Software Structures of Assistive Technologies

Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University

Knowledge, Prediction, and Hope

What is the Future for Cities Podcast

Workshop on Web Frameworks

Carnegie Mellon University

Accessibility and Play

ASSETS, St. John's, Canada

Disability and Data Equity

We All Count, Talking Data Equity
National Institutes of Health (NIH), Common Fund

Human-centered Machine Learning

Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University

Advanced Data Visualization with D3

Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University

Data Navigator

IEEE VIS, Melbourne, Australia
Apple
Carnegie Mellon University

Philosophy of Design

Visualizing Knowledge, Aalto University

Accessible Research

arXiv Accessibility Forum
University of Washington

Chartability

Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
EuroVis, Rome, Italy

Inclusive Data Experiences

Columbia University, Barnard College
Jupyter Project
DSxD

Fireside Chat: Charts in Context

Data Visualization Society

Fireside Chat: Accessibility in Data Visualization

Data Visualization Society

Data Science Best Practices: Accessibility

UC Berkeley BIDS

Are Your Data Visualizations Excluding People?

Outlier

Advanced Data Visualization and Accessibility on the Web

AccessU

Visualizations for Multi-Dimensional Data

Focus Summer School, Northwestern University
Focus Summer School, Northwestern University

High-Density Model Visualization

Data Viz Today

Introduction to JavaScript

Northwestern University

Introduction to Web Technology

Northwestern University

Introduction to Visualization

Northwestern University
Northwestern University

How to Make Scientific Figures

Northwestern University
Northwestern University

Service

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