The Experience

Tableau Research is an industrial research team focused on Tableau's mission of helping people see and understand data. The team generates new product and technology directions for Tableau and Salesforce, partners with internal teams and academia, and publishes at top academic conferences and journals.

We are looking for a Research Intern to join Tableau Research for a 12-week internship. You will work on a project you and your mentor agree on together, designed to advance your research career and bring new ideas to future product roadmaps.

• Work closely with a mentor on the Tableau Research team, with frequent check-ins (often daily), and collaborate with researchers, engineers, designers, and product partners.
• Explore research topics including visual analytics, conversational analytics, semantics and data preparation, human-computer interaction, machine learning, and AI-powered analytical tools.
• Gain hands-on experience with industry research and product development, with the opportunity to co-author an academic paper that may continue beyond the internship.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Scope a research question with your mentor that is ambitious and achievable within 12 weeks, then move quickly from idea to prototype.
• Design and build research prototypes, and run user studies or other evaluations to test your ideas.
• Share work in progress, present research updates at team meetings, and incorporate feedback along the way.
• Deliver a final presentation and written summary of your project, with the goal of turning it into a publishable paper.

You're Our Person If...

• You are currently enrolled in a PhD program and in good academic standing, with at least two years of research experience and a record of publishing at respected conferences or journals in areas such as data visualization, human-computer interaction, databases, or machine learning.
• You build functional research prototypes quickly in a programming language or framework of your choice (for example JavaScript/React, Python, R, or C++).
• You scope problems well, prioritize the most important questions, and deliver meaningful results within a fixed timeline.
• You communicate clearly in writing and in person, work well with people from different backgrounds, and seek out feedback early and often.

Even Better If...

• You have previous research internship experience.
• You have experience setting up user studies and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data.
• You have examples of user experience, interaction, or visualization design work to share if your project involves building interfaces.
• You have published at venues such as VIS, EuroVis, CHI, UIST, SIGMOD, IUI, CSCW, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, or NeurIPS.