It has been 4.5 years since Leland Wilkinson passed away, and H2O.ai recently open-sourced the final project the "godfather of data visualization" worked on. I had the immense privilege of collaborating with Lee on AutoViz and other projects for nearly four years. Together, we built an engine that automatically analyzes tabular datasets to provide the most interesting visualizations and data transformations from a statistical perspective.

Most of the world knows Leland Wilkinson as the architect of The Grammar of Graphics-the theoretical foundation for ggplot2, Tableau, and modern visualization theory. However, in his final years, Lee’s focus shifted toward a new frontier: Automated Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA).