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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. Making Every Letter Count: Abbreviating Text Labels on Demand

    by Fareeha Malik

    Have you ever tried to read a complex data visualization only to find the information buried under a mess of overlapping text or font so tiny you need a magnifying glass? Whether it’s a packed treemap or a busy map, fitting long words into small spaces is a classic headache in the world of data  ...Read More

  2. 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

  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. Visualizing Language Transfer Effects in Large Learner Corpora

    by Ethan Duggan

    Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is a research field that studies the process of learning another language. Language transfer effects occur when the learner applies structural, grammatical, or semantic rules from their native language to the language they are trying to learn. For example, a native  ...Read More

  5. 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

  6. 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

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

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