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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. 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

  2. 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

  3. Visualizing sexual harassment in academia: How researchers conveyed the bigger picture behind the data without compromising the individual significance of the stories.

    by Ethan Duggan

    Sexual harassment in academia is an unusually overlooked component of the greater societal conversation around sexual assault and harassment. This is especially puzzling when you consider the intense power dynamics that exist in academic institutions, as well as the non-academic aspects of universit  ...Read More

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

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

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