News and Notes

Look below for recent updates from the VACLab. There are two sections: News for announcements and our /etc section for commentary or technical posts.

News

Congratulations to Dr. Mengtian Guo!

VACLab-er Willliam Su completed her PhD in Fall 2025 with her thesis titled ‘Facilitating Human-Machine Teaming in Machine …

Congratulations to Dr. William Su!

VACLab-er Willliam Su completed his PhD in Spring 2025 with his thesis titled ‘Understanding How to Improve Data Preprocessing …

New NIH Grant: Advancing Data Science Tools for COVID-19 Analyses

A new NIH award supports adaptation of Cadence visual analytics technologies to COVID-19-motivated use cases.

Postdoc Opportunity at the VACLab

Apply now for this opportunity to join the VACLab as a postdoc! This NIH-supported position will support a postdoctoral scholar who …

Congratulations to Dr. Zhilan Zhou!

VACLab-er Zhilan Zhou completed her PhD this fall with here thesis titled ‘An Examination of Analytic Focus and Perception During …

/etc

New D3.js Tutorials and Examples

Several years ago, I posted an online tutorial explaining how Joins work in D3. I used that tutorial to instruct students in my Visual …

Convert a Java Web Application (a WAR file) to a Desktop App

Building a new software tool as web application is a great way to let lots of people have access to your creation without requiring …

Search UNC Library Bookmarklet

This post is to share a bookmarklet that I created to help ease access to articles behind publisher paywalls. If you try to access an …

Election Maps: Representing Area and Population

Maps of election results are a staple in the US during campaign season. They appear in countless newspaper articles, TV news stories, …

A Tutorial on D3.js Joins

While there are a variety of Javascript libraries available for creating visualizations, the most widely used is D3.js. D3 stands for …