Duen Horng "Polo" Chau
Georgia Tech professor whose Polo Club of Data Science created Transformer Explainer and CNN Explainer
- Professor and Associate Chair, School of Computational Science and Engineering; Associate Director, MS in Analytics, Georgia Institute of Technology12
Duen Horng "Polo" Chau is a Professor and Associate Chair in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech's College of Computing, and an Associate Director of the MS in Analytics program. Chau's research group, the Polo Club of Data Science, works at the intersection of machine learning and visualization; its AI explainers include Transformer Explainer, Diffusion Explainer and CNN Explainer.123
Career
Chau completed a PhD in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012, with a thesis on combining data mining and human-computer interaction to make sense of large graphs. Chau joined Georgia Tech's School of Computational Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in 2012, became an associate professor in 2018 and a professor in August 2024.2
Chau has been an Associate Director of Georgia Tech's MS in Analytics program since 2014, and from 2019 to 2025 served as Director of Industry Relations at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science and Associate Director of Corporate Relations at the Center for Machine Learning.21
Research and AI explainers
Chau's group builds interactive tools that help people understand large datasets and machine learning models, with work spanning human-centered and interpretable AI, adversarial machine learning, graph mining and cybersecurity. Its AI explainers for learners include CNN Explainer (2020), Diffusion Explainer (2024) and Transformer Explainer.12
Transformer Explainer, whose paper lists Aeree Cho first and Chau last, is an interactive visualization for learning how text-generative transformer models work. It was presented as an IEEE VIS 2024 poster and as a paper at ACM CHI 2026, and the open-source tool is credited to its creators at the Georgia Institute of Technology.432
Work
Transformer ExplainerOpen-source code
Last-listed author of the Transformer Explainer paper (ACM CHI 2026) and one of the tool's creators at Georgia Tech, as credited in the repository README.342
CNN Explainer (external site: poloclub.github.io)Open-source code
Co-author of CNN Explainer (IEEE VIS 2020), an interactive visualization for learning convolutional neural networks.2
Career timeline
Aug 2012
Completed a PhD in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University.2
Aug 2012
Joined Georgia Tech as an assistant professor of computational science and engineering.2
May 2014
Became an Associate Director of Georgia Tech's MS in Analytics program.2
Aug 2018
Became an associate professor and served as Machine Learning Area Leader until 2021.2
2020
Co-authored CNN Explainer, presented at IEEE VIS 2020.2
Aug 2024
Became a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Computational Science and Engineering.2
Aug 2024
Posted the Transformer Explainer paper as last-listed author.4
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Assistant Professor (2012–2018) and Associate Professor (2018–2024), School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology2
Honors and recognition
- Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention · Carnegie Mellon University, 20122
- Google Faculty Research Award · Google, 20152
- Intel Outstanding Researcher Award · Intel, 20192
- ACM Distinguished Speaker · Association for Computing Machinery, 20202
- IEEE VIS Best Poster Award (Transformer Explainer) · IEEE VIS, 20242
- Best Submission, VIS 2025 Workshop on Visualization for AI Explainability (Transformer Explainer) · VISxAI Workshop at IEEE VIS, 20252
Related people
More sourced profiles at the same organization, in the same field, or from the same school.
- Aeree ChoAlso at Georgia Institute of Technology
- Aleksandra MojsilovićSafety and alignment
- Albert GuAlso from Carnegie Mellon
- Byron BootsAlso at Georgia Institute of Technology
- Arthur ConmyInterpretability
- Alex SmolaAlso from Carnegie Mellon
- Chris OlahInterpretability
- Alexei A. EfrosAlso from Carnegie Mellon
- Ian GoodfellowSafety and alignment
- Ali FarhadiAlso from Carnegie Mellon
- Jacob SteinhardtSafety and alignment
- Andrew NgAlso from Carnegie Mellon
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