Congratulations to Dr. Zhilan Zhou!

VACLab-er Zhilan Zhou successfully defended her dissertation in August 2024 and officially graduated with her PhD in Computer Science at the end of the Fall 2025 semester. Her dissertation, titled ‘An Examination of Analytic Focus and Perception During Exploratory Visual Analysis,’ provides insights into the key aspects of how people perform exploratory analysis with interactive visualization-based tools.

More specifically, Dr. ZHou studied how cognitive biases influence perceptual judgements of visualized data, and examined the ways in which a user’s analytic focus evolves over time during exploratory analysis. Moreover, Dr. Zhou developed new methods for automatically modeling a user’s analytic focus over time based on their interactions with visual analytic systems. Based on those models, Dr. Zhou demonstrated how content can be automatically surfaced within these systems to help user’s find information relevant to their evolving task focus. Moreover, Dr. Zhou also formalized a design space to characterize the various ways in which content recomendations can be surfaced to users within interactive visualization-based tools.

Dr. Zhou has shared her work through a number of pristigious publications at leading venues including ACM CHI, IEEE VIS, and ACM TIIS. Her dissertation is available from the Carolina Digital Repository.

Congratulations to the newest VACLab alumnus, Dr. Zhilan Zhou!