Alberto Cairo has been announced as the first keynote speaker for the RSS International Conference 2027, which will take place at the ICC Wales from 6-9 September 2027.
Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Infographics and Data Visualization at the University of Miami (UM). He is also the director of visualization at UM's Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing.
Cairo is considered a pioneer of interactive visualization in the news; he led graphics teams in Spain (1999-2005) and Brazil (2009-2012). He's the author of four books: The Functional Art (2013), The Truthful Art (2016), How Charts Lie (2019), and The Art of Insight (2023). His next book, Design Acts: How Data Visualization Represents, will be published in early 2028.
Over the past two decades, Cairo has consulted for companies, governments and educational institutions in more than 30 countries, including Google, Eurostat, and the World Bank. His latest project is the Open Visualization Academy), a free, open-source library of educational materials about information design and data visualization.
At the RSS Conference, Alberto will talk on the topic of ‘DESIGN ACTS: A Visualization Designer's Ethos’. Commenting on the keynote, he said ‘Conversations and scholarship about statistical graphs, data maps, or diagrams often focus on technical aspects—software, practices, heuristics, and so on—or on perceptual and cognitive effectiveness, rather than on the motivations, goals, and ethos of designers. My most recent work, including this talk, tries to shift that balance by outlining a very personal and tentative ethical framework for visualization design.’
We greatly look forward to hearing more in Newport next year. For more information on RSS 2027 and how to get involved can be found on the conference webpages.