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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. 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

  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. Beyond Word Clouds: Exploring Your Car’s Problems in 3D

    by Fareeha Malik

    When your car makes a strange rattling sound, you might head online to see if others have had the same issue. But if you’ve ever waded through thousands of consumer complaint reports, you know the frustration. You’re often met with long, dry lists of text or simple “word clouds” that lack context.  ...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. 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

  6. 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

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

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