We are a research group in the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. Our mission is to support interactive data analysis and data-driven communication through human-centered techniques and systems. We are affiliated with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at UMD.

Interested in Getting Involved?
If you're currently an undergraduate or a Master's student at UMD and would like to get involved in our research, please read this page first before contacting us.

News
Feb. 2025 Two papers accepted at ACM CHI 2025: What-if Analysis for Business Professionals led by Sneha, and Comparing Collaborative Writing Behaviors through Visual Analytics led by Yuexi (Tracy).
Nov. 2024 Congratulations to Chen Chen on his successful dissertation defense! Chen will join Dolby Laboratories as a senior researcher.
Aug. 2024 Our paper on manipulable semantic components receives an Honorable Mention award at IEEE VIS 2024.
Jul. 2024 We will be presenting 3 full papers (the influence of examples on design outcomes, manipulable semantic components, and a task framework for event sequence analytics) and 2 short papers (evaluating the semantic profiling capabilities of LLMs, and managing automated data insights) at IEEE VIS 2024.
Jul. 2024 Leo receives a DARPA STTR grant on Reasoned Cyber Visualization (Phase I).
Jul. 2024 Paper on the effects of turn-taking order and AI-powered editing tools on collaborative writing accepted at CSCW 2024.
Mar. 2024 Paper led by Yuexi (Tracy) on AI-assisted mixed-media tutorial creation on physical tasks accepted at CHI 2024.
Nov. 2023 Leo joins the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) as an Associate Editor.
Jul. 2023 Our paper on deconstructing SVG charts for layout reuse is accepted at VIS 2023.
Jul. 2023 Leo receives an NSF CAREER Award.
Jun. 2023 Two short papers on authoring responsive documents with layout generation and guided data analysis in computational notebooks accepted at VL/HCC 2023.
May 2023 Survey paper led by Chen on the state of the art in creating visualization corpora for automated chart analysis accepted at EuroVis 2023.
Apr. 2023 Paper led by Zinat on a comparative evaluation study of visual summarization techniques for event sequences accepted at EuroVis 2023.
Apr. 2023 Congratulations to Hannah for receiving a Summer Research Fellowship!
Aug. 2022 Leo is giving a keynote talk on "Towards Scalable and Interpretable Visual Analytics" at the Visualization in Data Science workshop at ACM KDD.
Jul. 2022 Paper led by Hannah on how visualization designers find and use examples accepted at VIS 2022.
Aug. 2021 Our short paper Atlas: Grammar-based Procedural Generation of Data Visualizations will appear at VIS 2021.
Feb. 2021 Two papers co-authored by Leo will appear at CHI 2021:
Data Animator: Authoring Expressive Animated Data Graphics, and
Leveraging Text-Chart Links to Support Authoring of Data-Driven Articles with VizFlow.
Sep. 2020 The HDI group officially started at UMD!