VACLab Researchers Honored with Best Paper Honorable Mention at IEEE VIS 2024

The 2024 IEEE VIS Conference started on Sunday, October 13 with the main paper tracks beginning two days later. Originally planned for St. Pete Beach, Florida, IEEE VIS was moved to a virtual format after hurricanes Helene and Milton impacted the city. While the storms dampaned the mood around the conference, the quality of scholarship on display remained. IEEE VIS is the premier international event for visualization research and this year’s proceedings included a number of interesting and innovative papers.

Given the quality of work on display, it was a great honor for VACLab-er Arran Zeyu Wang and co-authors David Borland and David Gotz to win a Best Paper Honorable Mention award for their article titled Beyond Correlation: Incorporating Counterfactual Guidance to Better Support Exploratory Visual Analysis.

This research demonstrated how guidance algorithms based on the theory of counterfactuals can improve exploratory analysis compared to traditional correlation-based approaches. It also presented evidence that the improved guidance resulted in changes in exploratory behavior. Please see our paper for more details about the study, counterfactual guidance, and the implications of this work on exploratory analysis.

This article was just one of several VACLab contributions to the IEEE VIS conference. Moreover, like all of the work the VACLab shared this year at IEEE VIS, the research was made possible in part by the National Science Foundation under Award #2211845.