News

  • 6 Jul 2020
    The Case Against Dashboards (when Visualizing a Pandemic)

    The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has negatively impacted our lives in many ways. The anxiety felt by many is amplified by the obsessive consultation of the latest numbers and statistics about cases, testing rates, deaths, and so on. Both the public and experts have turned to data visualizations to understand what is going on, as data visualization is a powerful tool to discover and communicate trends and relationships. Government agencies, news organizations, and academic labs have published a plethora of graphs and dashboards tracking minute details, sometimes with deceiving precision.
  • 6 Jul 2020
    Introducing the VDL Blog

    As of today, the Visualization Design Lab has a blog!
  • 19 Feb 2020
    Carolina Nobre Successfully Defends Dissertation

    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”.
  • 15 Feb 2020
    Two now pilot projects for VDL

    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.
  • 19 Oct 2019
    VDL at IEEE VIS!

    VDL members are contributing in various ways to VIS in Vancouver this year.
  • 13 Sep 2019
    Nina McCurdy Successfully Defends Dissertation

    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.
  • 4 Sep 2019
    Welcome to new PhD students and Software Engineers, Goodby to Others

    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.
  • 31 May 2019
    VDL at EuroVis in Porto

    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!
  • 13 May 2019
    Alex Bigelow Successfully Defends Dissertation

    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.
  • 19 Oct 2018
    One Keynote, Four Papers, and Two Posters at VIS

    VDL members are contributing in various ways to VIS in Berlin this year:
  • 7 Oct 2018
    VDL Indoor Air Quality Research Featured in The Salt Lake Tribune

    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!
  • 10 Sep 2018
    VDL Receives NSF Award to Develop Multivariate Network Visualization Platform

    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!
  • 9 Sep 2018
    Welcome to new PhD students

    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.
  • 9 Aug 2018
    Ethan Kerzner successfully defends Dissertation

    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.
  • 1 Aug 2018
    Three Papers Accepted at InfoVis'18

    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.
  • 23 Feb 2018
    New Seed Grant to Support Development of Genealogical Visualization Tool

    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.
  • 21 Feb 2018
    Alexander Lex wins NSF CAREER grant

    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.
  • 28 Sep 2017
    Heading to Phoenix, for IEEE Vis

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

  • 27 Jul 2017
    VDL at SIGGRAPH

    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!
  • 24 Jul 2017
    Meyer presents BioVis Keynote

    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!.
  • 30 Mar 2017
    VDL at EuroVis

    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!
  • 25 Oct 2016
    VDL back at IEEE Vis

    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.
  • 14 Oct 2015
    VDL at IEEE Vis

    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.
  • 19 Jun 2015
    Open PostDoc and PhD Student Position @ University of Utah

    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.