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Vialab is led by Dr. Christopher Collins at Ontario Tech University. This site serves as a home for our research and news about the lab. Check out our Github for software projects related to our research and our Medium account to keep up with our blog. Details about our various research projects can be found on our Research page.

Research Blog

  1. AI Meets the Piano: How LLMs Are Transforming Sight-Reading Practice

    by Fareeha Malik

    Learning to play the piano is a deeply rewarding journey, but it comes with a notoriously steep hurdle: sight-reading. Sight-reading is the ability to read and play a piece of sheet music fluently on the first look, much like reading a book out loud in your native language. While essential  ...Read More


More from our blog

  1. Beyond Menu Hopping: How “Magic Pen” Automatically Detects Your Pen Mode

    by Fareeha Malik

    When reading, grading, or editing a document with a digital stylus, your workflow can be interrupted by a frustrating problem: having to stop, move your hand across the screen, and select a toolbar option just to switch between writing notes, highlighting keywords, or underlining text. In  ...Read More

  2. Can We Learn to Trust AI? The Essential Role of Interactive Visualization

    by Fareeha Malik

    As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems increasingly influence critical decisions across healthcare, finance, policy, and everyday life, questions around trustworthiness, fairness, interpretability, and accountability have taken center stage. But how do humans actually come to trust these complex  ...Read More

  3. Bridging the Gap: How We’re Connecting Text Mining and Visualization

    by Fareeha Malik

    Have you ever wondered how scientists keep track of the thousands of research papers published every year? In fields like Visual Text Analytics, where experts use interactive charts to make sense of massive amounts of text data, the sheer volume of new ideas can be overwhelming. In our survey  ...Read More

  4. Can Eye Tracking Predict How Good You Are at Video Games?

    by Fareeha Malik

    When you jump into a competitive online game, finding balanced matches is everything. Competitive games need ways to distinguish different levels of player proficiency. But what if a computer could estimate your skill level simply by observing where your eyes move across the screen? In his honours  ...Read More

  5. Effects of Multiple Visual Channels on Outlier Detection: Why animated scatterplots are not well suited for data discovery

    by Ethan Duggan

    Data visualization is the practice of mapping data variables to visual variables, or visual dimensions. Despite only having two spatial dimensions to work with on a normal screen, data scientists often seek to cram as many data variables as possible into a single visualization using other visual dim  ...Read More

  6. Covid Connect: Enabling anonymous peer-based mental health support with artificial intelligence and visualization

    by Ethan Duggan

    It’s been well over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, prompting various measures from governments and private-sector entities alike. One of the first responses to the pandemic came in the form of widespread implementation of work-from-home and learn-from-home policies.  ...Read More

For more posts from our research blog, check out our Medium Page.

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