Alvitta Ottley

Alvitta Ottley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and is affiliated with the Division of Computational & Data Sciences and the Center for Trustworthy AI in CPS. Her lab website and Google Scholar profile are publicly accessible, and she can be reached at alvitta@wustl.edu.

Dr. Ottley earned her PhD (2016) and MS (2013) in Computer Science from Tufts University.

Her research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to enhance decision-making through personalized visualization systems. Key areas include leveraging machine learning and AI to analyze analysts' interaction logs, cognitive traits, and decision-making processes. Applications span health communication, intelligence analysis, and scientific discovery. She emphasizes designing human-in-the-loop visual analytics interfaces that align with human cognition, contributing to impactful systems like context-aware visualization tools.

Dr. Ottley has received prestigious awards, including the NSF CRII Award for medical decision-making (2018), NSF Career Award for context-aware systems, the 2022 EuroVis Early Career Award, and multiple best paper/honorable mentions at top visualization conferences (e.g., CHI, VIS, TVCG). These accolades reflect her innovative work in advancing visualization techniques.

In grants and advising, she leads NSF-funded projects and initiatives such as the AIR-D Summer Science Camp, which engages underrepresented high school students in AI/robotics. Her efforts bridge engineering and psychology to address real-world challenges, with ongoing work on trustworthy AI in cyber-physical systems through her Center affiliation.