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Vialab is led by Dr. Christopher Collins at Ontario Tech University.
In addition to this site, visit our Github for software and our Blog for approachable reports of our innovations.

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 Word Clouds: Exploring Your Car’s Problems in 3D

    by Fareeha Malik

    When your car makes a strange rattling sound, you might head online to see if others have had the same issue. But if you’ve ever waded through thousands of consumer complaint reports, you know the frustration. You’re often met with long, dry lists of text or simple “word clouds” that lack context.  ...Read More

  2. Rethinking the Search Bar: How “Slow” Visual Interfaces Help Scholars Explore the Humanities

    by Fareeha Malik

    We all take the single-line search bar for granted. You type in a few keywords, hit enter, and instantly get millions of results. But this familiar model relies on a major assumption: it presumes you already know exactly what you are looking for. For researchers in the humanities and social  ...Read More

  3. Digital Time Capsules: Exploring Geolocated Media Sharing

    by Fareeha Malik

    We rarely think about past experiences until we actively scroll back through our phone galleries or physical photo albums. But what if your surroundings could remind you of those moments automatically? Inspired by real-world treasure hunting in Geocaching and the historical photo overlays of Replay  ...Read More

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. How to Evaluate Guidance in Visual Analytics: A Dual Perspective

    by Fareeha Malik

    Visual Analytics pairs human reasoning with computational power to explore massive, complex datasets. Yet, because communication between people and software is rarely seamless, users often spend valuable time in frustrating trial-and-error analysis loops. To bridge these knowledge gaps, modern  ...Read More

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

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