AI, Dashboards, and Human Decisions: A Conversation with Melanie Tory

In this week’s episode, I talk with Melanie Tory, Professor of the Practice at Northeastern University, about how people actually use dashboards in the real world — and why that use often looks very different from what designers intend. Her research reveals that dashboards frequently serve as a starting point for accessing data rather than tools for answering questions directly, with many users simply exporting data to Excel to do their real analytical work. We also explore her work on AI-enabled healthcare systems designed to help clinicians monitor patient risk in intensive care units, including how to visualize uncertainty in ways that busy medical teams can process quickly. And we close with a look at her emerging research on how people are beginning to use generative AI tools for data visualization tasks. It's a thought-provoking conversation about the gap between the tools we build and the ways people actually work with data.

You can listen to AI, Dashboards, and Human Decisions: A Conversation with Melanie Tory online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

AI, Dashboards, and Human Decisions: A Conversation with Melanie Tory is an episode from The PolicyViz Podcast by The PolicyViz Podcast.

This episode is 36:13 long.

This episode was published on Mar 25, 2026.

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