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Vialab is led by Dr. Christopher Collins at Ontario Tech University. This site serves as a home for our research and news about the lab. Check out our Github for software projects related to our research and our Medium account to keep up with our blog. Details about our various research projects can be found on our Research page.

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. 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

  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. 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. 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

  5. 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

  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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