News

Congratulations to Devin for wrapping up his PhD!

Devin Lange successfully defended his dissertation on “Is that Right? Data Visualizations for Scientific Quality Control”. Devin was advised by Alex Lex, with Kate Isaacs, Paul Rosen, Hanspeter Pfister, and Nils Gehlenborg serving on the committee.

Congratulations to Kiran!

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.

Congratulations to Haihan!

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.

Congratulations to Jen!

Jen Rogers successfully defended her dissertation on “Traceability in Design-Oriented Visualization Research”. Jen was co-advised by Alex Lex and Miriah Meyer, with Marina Kogan, Chris Johnson, and Uta Hinrichs serving on the committee.

Seven VDL lab members are back in person at IEEE VIS this year! We especially look forward to co-host the Utah Party together with other SCI members on Tuesday night at Social Capital! Make sure to say hi, come to our talks and to the party.

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.

derya akbaba will be discussing her and Miriah Meyer’s lightening talk “Reflections on applying feminist theory to visualization research” at the Info+ Conference on Sept. 28, 2021. The talk is a reflection of on-going work with feminist scholar Lauren Klein.

VDL members are contributing in various ways to Virtual Vis 2020 this year.

Carolina Nobre successfully defended her dissertation “Visualizing Multivariate Networks”. Congratulations also to Alexander Lex for his mentorship. Carolina will join Harvard University as a “Harvard Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow”.

Two new pilot projects with VDL participation have been funded out of the 1U4U initiative.

Miriah Meyer is collaborating with Janet Iwasa and Jason Shepherd on a project to capture and communicate diverse biomedical hypothesis through visualization.

Alexander Lex is working with Thomas Zangle and Robert Judson-Torres on visualizing cancer cell growth response data based on quantitative phase imaging.

VDL members are contributing in various ways to VIS in Vancouver this year.

Nina McCurdy successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Action Design Research for Applied Visualization Design”. Congratulations also to Miriah Meyer for her great mentorship. Nina will join NASA’s Ames Research Center as a staff scientist.

We welcome three new PhD students and two software engineers to our Group.

• Derya Akbaba is a new PhD fellowship student joining us after spending a couple of years at Locus Analytics in New York City.
• Max Marno is a new PhD fellowship student who has spent his last two years as a GIS analyst in Breckenridge, CO..
• Cole Polychronis joins us as a PhD fellowship student after graduating from Westminster College.
• Kaleb Bickmore is a new full stack software engineer who will work on health-related projects.
• Jack Wilburn is a new full stack software engineer who will support the NSF MultiNet project.

Several VDL members will be at EuroVis in Porto. In addition to the PIs, Carolina Nobre and Samuel Quinan will be attending. Sam will present the full paper on implicit discretization in color maps (rainbows!), and Carolina will present the state of the art report on multivariate network visualization. Please join us for these talks or just say hi if you see us!

Alex Bigelow successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Reflections, Models, and Software for Iterative Visualization Design”. Congratulations also to Miriah Meyer for her great mentorship. Alex has already moved on to a postdoctoral position with Kate Isaacs at the University of Arizona.

VDL members are contributing in various ways to VIS in Berlin this year:

If you could see how chores impact your home’s air quality, you might do them differently! This piece is based on new research by VDL members Jimmy Moore, Pascal Goffin, Miriah Meyer, and the School of Computing’s Jason Wiese to help local families see the unseen with indoor air quality senors. The one article your child doesn’t want you to read!

Miriah Meyer and Alexander Lex, in collaboration with teams from Kitware, the University of Idaho, Knowedge Vis, Duke University, and the Carnegie Institution of Science, have received an award from NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to develop a web-based reproducible visual analysis platform for multivariate networks. We’re very excited about this project and about the prospect of working with this amazing team!

We welcome three new PhD Students to our Group.

• Kiran Gadhave joins us as a PhD student after being a TA and an intern with the group before.
• Ilkin Safarli is a new PhD fellowship student who has previously contributed to the NEWT Pathway Editor.
• Haihan Lin joins us as a PhD fellowship student after graduating from Macalester College.

Ethan successfully defended his dissertation entitled “A Framework for Creative Visualization-Opportunities Workshops”. Congratulations also to Miriah Meyer for her great mentorship. Once the revisions are completed, Ethan will begin a job at Google X as a Data Visualization Engineer.

Three VDL papers were accepted at InfoVis. The topics range from creative visualization-opportunities workshops, to spanning-tree based graph visualization, to characterizing implicit errors in visualization.

Alexander Lex and Hilary Coon have received a $ 50,000 seed grant from the Utah Genome Project for developing Lineage, the visualization tool that helps researchers study clinical geneaolgies provided by the Utah Population Database. For details, see the project page.

Alexander Lex has received $ 512,000 from the National Science Foundation for developing software that will capture the decision-making process of doctors and other researchers by using algorithms and human-computer interaction methods. For details, see the project page.

Most of our group will be at VIS again; we’re especially excited for our first-timers Aspen Hopkins and Jen Rogers.

Three VDL members will be at the 2017 SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. If you see them, say hello and go check out Jennifer’s poster. We look forward to connecting with everyone at the conference!

Miriah Meyer gave a keynote for BioVis at ISMB in Prague, Czech Republic. The topic was “Just a tool, or a science? The role of visualization in biology”, and it was standing room only!.

Two VDL members will be at the EG/VGTC EuroVis conference in Barcelona. Be sure to say hello, come to our talks, and we look forward to connecting with everyone at the conference!

We’ll be back at IEEE VIS this time in Baltimore. Our students will be presenting multiple papers and also host a party together with other SCI members! Make sure to say hi, come to our talks and to the Party.

Members of VDL will be at IEEE VIS in Chicago. We will be presenting multiple papers and also host a party together with other SCI members! Make sure to say hi, come to our talks and to the Party.

We are seeking a postdoctoral fellow and multiple PhD students to join the Vis Design Lab and the Caleydo Team at the University of Utah. Please get in touch with Alexander Lex at alex@sci.utah.edu.