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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 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. 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

  3. 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

  4. Before the Vision Pro: How a Retro Gaming Hack Previewed the Future of Brain Surgery

    by Fareeha Malik

    We’ve all seen medical dramas where doctors intently stare at a flat computer monitor, analyzing black-and-white brain scans before a high-stakes operation. Advanced 3D imaging techniques like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) scans have become vital tools for clinical  ...Read More

  5. Case Study: Querying a Video Dataset Using Explainable A.I.

    by Ethan Duggan

    Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is an emerging field of artificial intelligence that focuses on the development an AI models that can explain their behavior on some level to human collaborators. These explanations can be developer-focused to help in understanding, designing, and improving  ...Read More

  6. Your Webcam Might Be the Secret to Solving Your Back Pain

    by Fareeha Malik

    We’ve all been there: deeply focused on a project, only to realize hours later that our neck is stiff, our shoulders are hunched, and we’ve essentially transformed into a human pretzel. In our increasingly sedentary world, “chair-work” has become the norm, and while we’ve known for over 300 years  ...Read More

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

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