As far back as I remember, I was a fan of clear, catchy, and entertaining visual data representations. Like those that often appear in the National Geographic or the Economist – the engaging ways of presenting scientific facts and data.
Its amazing to live in the world where tools for advanced visualizations are becoming available to the mere mortals. Thank goodness that one no longer needs to be a designer to create them! For example, below are sample word clouds of my CV and my research statement. I love them because they convey the long detailed documents’ feel visually and concisely.
A CV word cloud. Publications included in the CV – hence the predominant role of the IEEE and ACM in the visual.
A research statement word cloud.
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
