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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. Professional Differences: How Disciplinary Training Affects Visualization Task Performance

    by Ethan Duggan

    Empowering people across all disciplines and professions to understand their data is the enduring promise of visualization. When designing a visualization for a specific industry or discipline, visualization designers will consider the nature of the data and how it is used by that specific disciplin  ...Read More

  2. 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

  3. Making Data Less Stressful: A Smart System That Knows When You’re Frustrated

    by Fareeha Malik

    We’ve all been there: you’re trying to use a new piece of software, but the buttons don’t make sense, the data looks like a confusing mess, and you’re starting to feel your blood boil. Usually, computers are oblivious to our “human” moments. They sit there silently while we get more and more  ...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. Beyond the Static Page: A New Framework for Interactive Conference Posters

    by Fareeha Malik

    Poster sessions are a staple of academic conferences, offering a fantastic space to share research and spark informal conversations. However, standard printed posters have some major limitations: they aren’t very memorable, they can’t be easily saved for later, and their charts are stuck in a  ...Read More

  6. 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

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

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