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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. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  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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