About
What is datananda?
“Datananda” is inspired by the Sanskrit word ananda (आनन्द), meaning bliss or happiness.
It reflects my desire to transcend the often tedious and repetitive nature of ordinary data interactions by creating data experiences that are as engaging and enjoyable as they are informative.
Who is Madeleine Filloux?
Madeleine Filloux started working with complex datasets about 14 years ago at Brown University where she completed an undergraduate honors thesis on identifying disease-causing mutations in the human genome. (Incidentally, this is also when she wrote some of her first “real” code and crashed the lab computer by writing the output of her Perl program all onto a single line.) Documenting the methodology for this thesis work planted the seed for Madeleine's life goal: to communicate information in a way that is both effective and beautiful. This desire led her to a master's degree in information science at the University of Michigan where she expanded her interdisciplinary skill set with coursework in human computer interaction, user experience, data science, and graphic design.
Since then, Madeleine has worked with data across diverse domains to deliver insights to a wide variety of stakeholders. Her experience includes designing data driven interfaces for industrial software applications to make them intuitive for end users, developing interactive reporting for an agricultural sales team to optimize their performance and profitability, creating an aggregated view of an enterprise's marketing data to deliver consolidated and actionable insights, and building a custom business intelligence web application for operational and financial reporting at a sustainability financing company. She also enjoys teaching and has done so as a 1:1 mentor through the Data Visualization Society's mentorship program, as a boot camp instructor at the University of Minnesota's Data Visualization and Analytics Boot Camp, and as an adjunct professor of Data Analytics & Visualization at the University of St. Thomas.
Madeleine currently works as a Data Visualization Engineer at Gantry, a startup helping users build AI and ML systems that they trust. She still crashes her computer every now and then when she pushes the boundaries of information representation.