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hariseshadri

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Carnegie Mellon CS & ECE. Current: Dev at Comprehend YC W11. Past: Dev at Palantir Finance. Dev at Intel.

hariseshadri.com

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We absolutely welcome constructive criticism about both our product and how we portray it. We try to keep our screen shots and website feature listing up to date, but currently the team is working hard in preparation for our booth at DIA Philadelphia! Thanks for the well wishes.

I'm a dev at Comprehend and have worked first hand on both the query engine as well as quite a few of our visualizations.

We strive to generate insightful documents, which provide value beyond default Excel charts, by providing interactivity which as you pointed out may be poorly captured in screenshots. With that said, our visualization suite consists of both graphs made by cutting edge third party charting libraries as well as in-house custom plots.

On interactivity, three of our most interesting features are drill-down, dynamic real-time highlights and filtering, and global view synchronization.

Drill-down, or click-through, refers to the ability to look into any given presented data point to see where it came from. For instance, if you are plotting the number of medications taken by site, you can right-click on any point or bar in the chart and see exactly which patients make up that data point, what the medications were, and even what symptoms those patients were experiencing. The backing data may come from different tables, different databases, or even a different type of data store all together (such as a flat file or SAS data set).

Comprehend also supports dragging a highlight or filter onto any active report or visualization. Highlights can be generated by the user on the fly; anything from "males over 60 years old" to a custom R function is fair game. Filters are functionally equivalent except instead of highlighting data which matches the predicate, we eliminate data that does not.

The product also supports global applied state, which consists of highlights and filters, which is automatically applied to all active views. This makes it easy to look at the same subset of data in different views to help answer questions and identify trends. We provide other interactive features, such as intelligent tooltips, various exporting options and view transformations, but in my opinion these are the most interesting.

It's easy to confuse Comprehend as a general BI or visualization tool. Although we provide this functionality, the hard tech problem we solve is answering questions where the data lies in disparate data sources.

This high level of interactivity and ground-up support for multiple data stores provide value beyond default Excel charting.

Face Detector in JS 14 years ago

Very cool. I did my CMU capstone project on Face Recognition, http://hari.seshadri.com/Projects/School/FaceRecognition/ind...

As far as detection goes though, we used an out-of-the-box facial landmark viola jones detector, so I never did any of the hard word you did. We did some cool stuff with normalization, facial landmark cropping, illumination mitigation (and artificial illumination), and recognition though.

This looks great though, good job!