chenglong-hn

4 ms·

31.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
for agent to generate, but also easy for human to edit (especially with UI) :)
32.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
Some composite charts are quite annoying to be generated well (like bullet, waterfall etc), their Vega-Lite equivalent can be quite long if just starting from scratch. The intention here is that Flint is a simpler abstraction to get basic s
33.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
we are considering also reliability, interactivity besides expressiveness. Simpler spec with good expressiveness comes handy when you want the agent to be reliably for non-expert users and with small models.
34.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
right, in fact many small models still struggle with following json, some new forms are also needed
35.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
For AI agents and Humans :)
36.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
That's awesome! I find that besides training better models, designing new language for agents is also a super viable paths to improve their performance!
37.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
Vega was a high-level language in the past for human, but now they can be a bit too low-level for AI agents! AI agents have to write a lot of low-level params just to make charts looking good, and the result is that programs are hard to wri
38.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
This is fun! We started thinking it would just be an engineering task in the beginning, but doing a solid intermediate language turned out to be a research project (the paper will be out soon). Also, I find NTChart very fun, maybe we should
39.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
In fact, Json as a common language for human in visualization has been around for a while! The benefit of declarative grammar is that users can effective manipulate specs through UI (drag and drop, clicks). Btw, Flint is intentionally desig
40.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
It's more like a simple high-level spec to make it easier. The idea is that you don't have to fill position / axes details just to make the chart work. The compiler has a bit of magic of using semantic types to optimize what
41.
by chenglong-hn 3mo ago
Project page: https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/ MCP setup: https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/mcp
42.
Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents(microsoft.github.io)
350 points by chenglong-hn 3mo ago|137 comments
43.
by chenglong-hn 11mo ago
Zenquery is super cool! Data Formulator is mostly designed for data visualization and not as flexible for general QA -- we might be able to find some collaboration, Data Formulator is open source: https://github.com/microsof
44.
by chenglong-hn 11mo ago
It's here! https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator/tree/main/py-sr... When install Data Formulator locally, it's possible to connect DF to databases with connection parameters in UI. To ad
45.
by chenglong-hn 11mo ago
This is incredibly cool! A lot of times the user query can be ambiguous enough to make it consistent across runs. The semantic layer is essential to reduce ambiguity, either built by AI or engineers.
46.
by chenglong-hn 11mo ago
Feel free to submit requests in github for any customization needs!
47.
by chenglong-hn 11mo ago
That's something we are building! We hope to enhance the report generation as a dashboard builder. Instead of automatically compose an article out of the exploration, we could add more instructions and UI to allow user to specify how d
48.
by chenglong-hn 11mo ago
That's a good suggestion :)
49.
Show HN: Data Formulator – interactive AI agents for data analysis (Microsoft)(data-formulator.ai)
38 points by chenglong-hn 11mo ago|13 comments
50.
Show HN: Data Formulator 0.5 – Vibe with your data (Microsoft Research)(data-formulator.ai)
4 points by chenglong-hn 1y ago|0 comments
51.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
I'm tempted to add a button to support connecting data from/to ODBC/JDBC but at same time worried about security stuff... maybe there could be some intermediate layer to support this :)
52.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
yes! chat is still a necessary component, since it's sometimes the only way for us to communicate unstructured information to the system.
53.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
you find it! you can't imagine how often I'm annoyed when see April being ranked before March due to alphabetic order... Thus the sorting agent, and now running by default in the background!
54.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
That's a cool example! You are right, GPT-4o is much more powerful than we allow it to perform in Data Formulator, and our current design is to restrict it to a point that the model behavior is more or less reliable. While we design it
55.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
this is a big challenge! the more complicated the code generated by AI, the more likely is going wrong and harder to verify. (more magic == more risk) I'm curious how to really restrict what AI is generating each step so it is simple e
56.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
1. when started out, we have Tableau/PowerBI users as the main audience in mind, hoping to grant them the power of data analysts who program in python to create charts requiring data transformation. but as we are building the tool, dat
57.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
this is really really cool! directly working with table is sometimes the only way to clean the data as well :) I wish multiple ways of interacting with data can co-exist seamlessly in some sort of future tool (without overwhelming users (?)
58.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
this is constant challenge! code is the ultimate verification tool, but not everyone gets it. sometimes reading charts help, sometimes looking at data helps, other times only code can serve the verification purpose...
59.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
I'm not very confident either -- some of users in our user study also reports the same. :) We are recently thinking about how to have AI provide more information in ways we can interpret. For example, might adding some feature to hint
60.
by chenglong-hn 2y ago
potentially! I myself as an experienced programmer finds directly chatting with GPT-4o much easier, since I have full control. But Data Formulator only transforms data in the back and GPT-4o don't do anything with charts (sometimes we

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