VDL at IEEE VIS 2026
IEEE VIS is wrapping up – and it’s time to quickly recap VDL’s highlights at the conference.
Members of the lab had a busy week at IEEE VIS in Boston, MA. Here are some highlights from the conference:
Abhraneel presented his paper, Should We Dangle a Carrot? The Effect of Performance-based Incentives in Visualization Experiments, on incentives in crowdsourced studies. The gist is: incentives don’t necessarily result in better performance.
Zach presented his paper, Read, Critique, or Sketch? Investigating Alternative Visualization Literacy Assessment Modalities, on visualization literacy based on sketching and critique. Use these modalities if you want to differentiate high levels of expertise, or if you’re explicitly looking for creation or critique skills.
Tingying presented her paper, Touching or Chatting: The Utility of LLMs and Tactile Charts for Learning about Complex Chart Types by BLV Individuals, on combining tactile charts with LLMs for learning by blind or low-vision users. Tactile charts do help in understanding dynamic explanations generated by LLMs. Tingying and Alex also co-authored two papers that were presented in the AccessVis workshop.
We also taught a reVISit tutorial and had a well-attended meetup – it’s great to see how the community is adopting reVISit for their studies!
Zach participated in a panel on “Ways to Ground Theory, Methods, and Reliability of Visualization” in the VisXVision Workshop.
Alex’s take on the panel about using AI to generate and evaluate visualizations is that AIs are fine for creating and evaluating charts but tend to produce bland and unsurprising visualizations, unlike humans, who can produce exciting work.
VDL members also took home some awards: Tingying received the VGTC Best Dissertation Award, and Alex got the VGTC Technical Achievement Award.
It’s been an inspiring week, as always. See you all next year!