About

We are a team of visualization researchers at the University of Utah. Our interests include the process of designing and developing visualizations, visualization for biology, visualization frameworks, and, more generally, visualization of big, heterogeneous, and complex datasets.

VDL is part of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the School of Computing.

Blog And News

News: Kiran Gadhave Successfully Defends Dissertation 14 Mar 2024
Congratulations to Kiran!

Kiran celebrating that he passed his defense with the committee!

Kiran Gadhave successfully defended his dissertation on “Towards Reproducible and Reusable Visual Analysis”. Kiran was advised by Alex Lex, with Miriah Meyer, Jeff Phillips, Vivek Srikumar, and Marc Streit serving on the committee.

Congrats, and good luck with your next steps!

Kiran presenting

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Blog Post: Ferret — Catching Scientific Fraud with Data Visualizations 15 Sep 2023
Ferrets search data
Alas, artifacts abound
Manipulation

A Ferret cartoon questioning what we can do as visualization researchers to help prevent scientific fraud.
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News: Haihan Lin Successfully Defends Dissertation 19 Jul 2023
Congratulations to Haihan!

Haihan celebrating that she passed her defense!

Haihan successfully defended her dissertation on “Data Hunches: Expressing Personal Knowledge in Data Visualizations”. Haihan was advised by Alex Lex, with Miriah Meyer, Marina Kogan, Jason Wiese, and Eytan Adar serving on the committee.

Haihan is staying in Utah and will join other VDL Alumni at Lucid Software. Congrats, and good luck with your next steps!

Haihan and Alex Haihan opening some Champagne Haihan and her committee

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Blog Post: How People Actually Lie With Charts 17 Apr 2023
Online audiences and visualization researchers often share, discuss, and critique misleading visualizations. Existing critiques typically point out suboptimal choice of visual encoding or violations of common design guidelines. But is this how charts are used to deceive audiences and spread misinformation in practice? This blog post discusses the findings from our paper on misleading visualizations.

Figure shows an overlapping pile of screenshots of Twitter posts that include data visualizations.
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Recent Publications