Claudio Silva

Claudio Silva

Institute Professor, New York University

CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md

Guidance for Claude Code when working with Claudio Silva’s academic website (Jekyll/GitHub Pages at ctsilva.github.io).

Quick Commands

# Setup
bundle install --path vendor/bundle

# Local server (http://127.0.0.1:4000/)
# --livereload auto-refreshes the browser on .md/_sass edits
bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload --incremental

# JavaScript build
npm run build:js

Mermaid Diagrams (for Quarto slides)

# Setup
npm install -g @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

# Generate PNGs from .mmd files (script also exists in 2025-VisML-CSE/slides)
cd 2026-VisML-CDS/slides
python3 render_mermaid.py

# Manual generation
mmdc -i input.mmd -o output.png -w 800 -H 600 -t default -b transparent

Note: Always use PNG generation for RevealJS slides (inline mermaid doesn’t render reliably).

Site Structure

Jekyll Collections

  • _publications, _talks, _teaching, _portfolio, _posts, _pages
  • Publications in _pages/publications.md (chronological 2024→1996)
  • Media coverage in _pages/news.md (resilient linking with search fallbacks)

Key Files

  • _config.yml: Main configuration
  • markdown_generator/: Scripts for generating content from TSV/BibTeX

Course Websites

The repository includes complete course websites as subdirectories:

  • 2024-VisML-CDS: VisML (Visualization for Machine Learning) course website (Spring 2024, NYU CDS) - ARCHIVE
  • 2025-InfoVis-CSE: Information Visualization course website (Fall 2025, NYU Tandon) - CS-GY 6313 - ARCHIVE
  • 2025-VisML-CSE: Visualization for Machine Learning course website (Fall 2025, NYU Tandon) - CS-GY 9223 - ARCHIVE
  • 2026-InfoVis-CSE: Information Visualization (Fall 2026, NYU Tandon) - CS-GY 6313 B - ACTIVE
  • 2026-VisML-CDS: Visualization for Machine Learning (Fall 2026, NYU CDS) - DS-GA 3001 - ACTIVE

2026-InfoVis-CSE (CS-GY 6313 B)

  • Schedule: Fridays 11AM-1:30PM (Sept 4 - Dec 11), Jacobs Hall 6 MetroTech Room 315
  • No class: Nov 27 (Thanksgiving Recess). Fall Break (Oct 12) is a Monday and does not affect this course.
  • Sources copied from 2025; rendered .html was not copied — run quarto render per week before class.
  • Staff: TA (labs) and Grader are both Ryan Kim (returning from 2025; site https://www.rkim.dev, Observable handle @rk2546). Listed on home, syllabus, and week1-syllabus slides.
  • Instructor office hours: Fridays 1:30-2:30 PM, 370 Jay Street, Room 1153 (right after class).
  • Still stale in the lab decks: they point at Ryan’s 2025 resources — Observable notebooks under observablehq.com/@rk2546/2025-infovis-cse_week-N-lab and NYU Zoom rooms (nyu.zoom.us/j/92815268504, /2817596431, /98539408719), plus TA office hours listed as “Wednesdays 2-3PM, 8th floor common area @ 370 Jay”. Confirm with Ryan whether the notebooks get 2026 copies, whether the Zoom rooms and office hours are unchanged, and whether the separate “Grader TA” Zoom is still needed now that one person holds both roles. Then update the lab decks.

2026-VisML-CDS (DS-GA 3001)

  • Meeting pattern (corrected 2026-09-08 from the registrar listing): everything is on Tuesday. .001 Lecture Tuesdays 4:55-6:55 PM (120 min), then .002 Lab Tuesdays 7:10-8:00 PM (50 min) after a 15-min break, both in 60 Fifth Ave Room 150, cap 75 each. The lab is still its own registrar-scheduled section, so lab content does not consume lecture time — but it now lands at the end of a 3-hour evening rather than a day later, so a lab deck that overruns has no overnight reset. (An earlier version of this file recorded a Monday lecture as “confirmed”; that was wrong.)
  • Term: 14 Tuesdays, Sept 8 - Dec 8, with no cancellations — Labor Day (Sept 7) and Fall Break (Oct 12) are Mondays, Thanksgiving (Nov 26-27) is Thu-Fri. No Wednesday make-up is needed.
  • No final exam during exam week. Reading Day is Tue Dec 15 (no classes). Final report still due Dec 14 (term end), a week after the last class.
  • Instructor office hours: Fridays 1:30-2:30 PM, 370 Jay Street, Room 1153 (Brooklyn, not Washington Square).
  • Session leader (labs) & grader: Bhavya Matam (bm3792@nyu.edu).
  • Known inconsistency, not yet resolved: the project proposal is due Week 4, but the project-discussion deck (slides/week6-project-discussion.qmd, shown Week 5) presents proposal guidelines after it is due. That deck also still carries 2025 content — “Parikshit Solunke (Lead TA)”, proposal due “October 13 (during Fall Break)”, report due “December 11”. Decide the proposal date, then fix the deck.
  • Registrar deadlines (Fall 2026): add/drop full-semester Sept 15; withdraw & pass/fail Nov 25; Thanksgiving recess Thu-Fri Nov 26-27 (does not affect Mon/Tue sessions).
  • Sources copied from 2025-VisML-CSE; rendered .html was not copied — run quarto render per week before class.

  • Deck sizing against the real 120 min + 50 min split. Lecture ≈60 slides max; a hands-on 50-min lab is more like ~25. Tandon’s 150-min combined block is why several decks run long:

    WeekDateLecture deck(s)SlidesLab deckSlides
    1Sept 8week2-intro + week2-infovis79 overweek2-lab17 ok
    2Sept 15week3-perception + week3-color60 at limitweek3-slides11 ok
    3Sept 22week4-model-assessment51 oknone — see below—
    4Sept 29week5-white-box64 slightly overweek5-lab7 ok
    5Oct 6week6-black-box + week6-project-discussion82 overweek6-lab34 over
    6Oct 13week8-clustering + default-project57 okweek7-lab39 over
    7Oct 20week9-dimensionality21 okweek8-lab3 ok
    8Oct 27week7-deep-learning24 okweek9-lab31 over
    9Nov 3week11-nlp35 okweek11-lab51 way over
    10Nov 10week10-tda99 way overweek12-lab35 over
    11Nov 17Time Series — no deck yet———
    12Nov 24Interpretable ML & Fairness — no deck yet———

    Lecture problem is concentrated: Week 10 TDA (99 slides), then Weeks 5 and 1. Labs run long more often (six of nine) because 50 min is tight — but lab overflow is far less disruptive than lecture overflow.

  • Unresolved lab materials. Nine lab decks exist as .qmd and are scheduled. Still open:
    • Model Assessment lab (2026 Week 3, Sept 22). In 2025 this deck lived only in external Google Slides (linked from labs/week4-recap.md), never in the repo — so it silently dropped out of the schedule. Currently listed on home/schedule as “materials in preparation”.
    • labs/week10-lab/ holds only a recap; the 2025 session was a guest presentation (Parikshit, external Google Slides). Not placed in the 2026 schedule — decide whether to repeat it.
    • Orphaned notebooks, not linked from any page: labs/Lab_white_box_vis1.ipynb, labs/Lab_white_box_vis2.ipynb (white-box, Week 4), labs/VisML_TDA_Lab.ipynb (TDA, Week 10).

2025-VisML-CSE (CS-GY 9223)

  • Schedule: Mondays 5-7:30PM (Sept 2-Dec 11), Room 473
  • Status: Week 11 (NLP and LLMs) COMPLETE ✅
  • Discord: https://discord.gg/dyHSFN65
  • Materials: week2-intro, week2-infovis, week2-lab, week4-model-assessment, week5-white-box, week6-black-box, week7-deep-learning, week11-nlp

Course Material Enhancement Workflow

Trigger: “PLAN to do these updates for Week X”

  1. Rename generic figures: paperX.png → descriptive-name.png
  2. Standardize citations: Add footer citations with DOI links
  3. Add theoretical content: Include foundational slides with speaker notes
  4. Optimize for projector: Light code backgrounds, large centered videos
  5. Quality check: Render, test links, commit with descriptive messages
  6. Update docs: Mark week complete in CLAUDE.md

2025-InfoVis-CSE (CS-GY 6313)

  • Schedule: Fridays 11AM-1:30PM (Sept 5-Dec 13), Room 215
  • Status: Week 13 COMPLETE ✅ (Final presentations Dec 5 & 12)
  • Discord: https://discord.gg/sTEv3PnP
  • Materials: week1-syllabus, week2-data-transformation, week3-fundamental-graphs, week4-perception, week5-color, week6-group-projects, week7-interaction, week8-geovis-2d-maps, week9-urban-flows-interactivity, week10-urban-3d-simulation, week11-temporal-data, week12-clustering-dimreduction, week13-network-data
  • Resources: home.md, syllabus.md, schedule.md, slides/, labs/

Quarto Slide Creation

# Render slides
cd 2026-InfoVis-CSE/slides/
quarto render week1-syllabus.qmd

# Preview with live reload
quarto preview week1-syllabus.qmd

# Commit both HTML and _files/ directories
git add week1-syllabus.html week1-syllabus_files/
git commit -m "Add Week 1 slides"

The 2026 sites were copied without rendered output, so each deck needs a quarto render before its class. *.html / *_files/ are globally ignored with a per-year negation in .gitignore — add new course years there or renders stay uncommitted.

Template header:

---
title: "Title"
subtitle: "CS-GY 6313 - Fall 2026"
author: "Name"
format:
  revealjs:
    theme: [default, custom.scss]
    logo: figs/vida.jpg
    width: 1920
    height: 1080
---

Slide layouts: six canonical layouts (full-bleed, statement + figure, 40/60 text|figure, centred .nostretch, comparison, text-only) with the sizing rules that actually hold under this theme are in slide-templates/LAYOUTS.md; slide-templates/layout-templates.qmd renders one slide per layout. Pick the layout from the figure’s aspect ratio, not the amount of text. Two traps: width= alone does not disable auto-stretch (add .nostretch), and images inside .columns need height="760" (square/tall) or width="100%" (landscape).

Reference Management

PDF Naming: LastName_Year_Short_Title.pdf

Footer Citations:

:::footer
Author, A. (Year). [*Title*](../refs/Author_Year_Title.pdf). Venue.
:::

Venue Abbreviations: IEEE TVCG, CHI, ICML, AISTATS, ECML-PKDD