I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. I direct the WatVis (Waterloo Visualization) research group. I am affiliated with the WaterlooHCI lab. I am also a member of the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute (Waterloo.ai) and the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics (WISA). I received my Ph.D from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, where I was affiliated with the Dynamic Graphic Project (DGP) lab.

My research focuses on the areas of Information Visualization (InfoVis), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Visual Analytics, and Data Science. I develop novel interactive systems and visual representations that promote the interplay between humans, machines, and data. My research aims to boost the efficiency of human-data interaction with exploratory and explanatory interfaces that tightly integrate the flexibility and creativity of users with the scalability of algorithms and machine learning.

I am always seeking highly-motivated and hard-working PostDoc, Ph.D., M.Math., and undergraduate students to work with my team on exciting research projects. Please read the Prospective page before contacting me; otherwise, you will unlikely get a response.

News

Four papers are conditionally accepted at CHI'23. Jan, 2023.
Four papers led and/or participated by WatVis members are conditionally accepted at CHI'23, on a range of topics including AI-assisted graphics design, data science support tools, open dataset gathering, and AI voice agent.

Honorable Mention at VIS'22. Oct, 2022
Results of a fruitful collaboration, "Toward Systematic Considerations of Missingness in Visual Analytics," has won an Honorable Mention paper award at VIS'22.

Two papers are accepted at EuroVis'22 and GI'22, respectively. May, 2022
Two papers from WatVis, one on intelligent authoring tools for infographics, and the other on data visualization design in spatial augmented reality, are accepted at EuroVis'22 and GI'22, respectively.

Two papers are conditionally accepted at CHI'22 and one paper is accepted at CSCW'22. Jan, 2022.
Three papers in total led by and participated by WatVis members will appear at CHI'22 and CSCW'22. Topics include mobile communication of emotions, learning analytics of classrooms, and human-AI collaboration.

Three papers are accepted at VIS'21. July, 2021.
Three papers led by WatVis graduate and undergraduate members will be presented at VIS'21 in October, focusing on various topics such as collaborative UX and high-dimensional data analysis. Congrats to Ehsan, Xinhai, and our collaobrators! Stay tuned for our preprints.

InfoColorizer is accepted at TVCG. June, 2021.
A paper resulted from a collaborative project between HKUST and U Waterloo researchers is accepted at TVCG. Congrats to Linping and Ziqi!

Two papers are accepted at CHI'21. May, 2021.
Two papers led by awesome U Waterloo graduate and undergraduate students will be presented at CHI'21, featuring interactive data science solutions. Congrats to all the students and collaborators!

Recent and Best

VibEmoji (CHI'22)
Authoring multi-modal emoticons consiting of stickers, animation effects, and vibrotactile patterns.
NBSearch (CHI'21)
Semantic search and exploration of computational notebook collections.
KTabulator (CHI'21)
Interactively building ad hoc tables based on knowledge graphs.
ChartSeer (TVCG'20)
Exploratory visual analysis with chart recommendations.
Hand-over-face gestures (MobileHCI'19)
Interacting with your smartphone through the built-in camera.
KTGraph (VAST'17)
Studying handoff of partial findings in asynchronous collaborative sensemaking.
EgoLines (CHI'16)
Visual exploration of dynamic egocentric networks.
MatrixWave (CHI'15)
Visual comparison of event sequence data, such as user clickstreams on websites.
FluxFlow (VAST'14)
Visual analysis of anomalous information spreading in social media.

Sponsors

Thank the following sponsors for kindly offering cash and in-kind contributions to our research!