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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. Parallel Tag Clouds: A Look Back at One of Our Most Influential Papers

    by Ethan Duggan

    In this blog post, we take a look back at an older paper of ours titled Parallel Tag Clouds to Explore and Analyze Faceted Text Corpora, and explore how it has influenced data visualization research since it was published. Parallel Tag Clouds was presented at the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics  ...Read More

  2. 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

  3. Mastering Italian Verb Conjugation: How NLP Powers the “Card-it” Digital Flashcard App

    by Fareeha Malik

    Learning a morphologically rich language like Italian is an exciting journey, but mastering its intricate system of verb conjugations and inflections can be a daunting challenge for many learners. Traditional tools often fall into two camps: rigid apps with pre-set decks that cannot be customized  ...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. Transforming Language Learning Through AI Comics: Meet LingoComics

    by Fareeha Malik

    Anyone who has tried learning a new language on an app has likely memorized phrases like “The apple is red” or repeated drills until their eyes glazed over. Conventional language learning platforms (such as Duolingo and Memrise) have seen massive adoption, but they typically rely on pre-determined  ...Read More

  6. 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

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

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