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
Conducting user studies to evaluate visualizations is a popular approach for evaluation. During the pandemic such user studies have migrated to crowdsourced platforms due to restrictions on in-person studies. Do we pay the participants in our studies fairly? Is it our job to do so? Our panel at IEEE VIS 2021, explored the above questions and many more.

Congratulations to Jimmy!

Jimmy Moore successfully defended his dissertation “The Personal Informatics Analysis Gap”. Congratulations also to Miriah Meyer and Jason Wiese, who co-advised Jimmy, for their mentorship.
We’re very excited about contributing to IEEE VIS again this year. Here’s a summary of the VDL activity.

- Devin Lange will present his paper titled Loon: Using Exemplars to Visualize Large-Scale Microscopy Data . Congratulations to Devin for his honorable mention for Best Paper! Tune in to Devin’s talk at VIS 2021 on Friday, October 29th, 2021 at 10:30am CDT .
- Jimmy Moore will present his paper on Exploring the personal informatics analysis gap: “There’s a lot of bacon” . Check out the teaser for the paper and the very funny outtakes . Tune in to Jimmy’s talk at VIS 2021 on Wednesday, October 27th, 2021 at 12:15pm CDT .
- Alexander Lex will give a keynote at BioVis on “Spatial Omics Visualizations: Lessons Learned from Networks and Maps”. Tune in to the talk on Monday, October 25th, 2021 at 11am CDT .
- Alex will give a keynote at MLUI 2021 on “Opportunities for Understanding Semantics of User Interactions” on Sunday, October 24th, 2021 at 12:05pm CDT .
- Alex will also be a panelist on the “Wait…when did we sign up to be economists?” panel on Friday, October 29th, 2021 at 8am CDT .
- Alex is co-hosting a MeetUp on “Evaluating Complex Interactive Visualizations” on Wednesday, Oct 27th, 2021 at 2pm CDT .
- Miriah Meyer will participate in a panel at VISActivies: Workshop on Data Vis Activities to Facilitate Learning, Reflecting, Discussing, and Designing on on Monday, October 25th, 2021 at 10am CDT .
- derya akbaba and Jack Wilburn will present on Manifesto for Putting
Chartjunk
in the Trash 2021! on Sunday, October 24th, 2021 at 12:10pm CDT at alt.VIS workshop - derya akbaba and Pranav Rajan will present a poster on MultiAggr: A Technique for Aggregating Multivariate Networks on Wednesday, October 27th, 2021 at 2pm CDT .
- derya akbaba and Kiran Gadhave will organize a panel titled “Wait…when did we sign up to be economists?” on Friday, October 29th, 2021 at 8am CDT .
- Kiran Gadhave will be working as a student volunteer at virtual vis.