The University of North Carolina's VisuaLab is an interdisciplinary research laboratory headed by Dr. Danielle Albers Szafir. Situated within the Department of Computer Science at UNC and also affiliated with the University of Colorado's ATLAS Institute, the VisuaLab explores the intersection of data science, visual cognition, and computer graphics. Our goal is to understand how people make sense of visual information to create better interfaces for exploring and understanding information. We work with scholars from psychology to biology to the humanities to design and implement visualization systems that help drive innovation. Our ultimate mission is to facilitate the dialog between people and technologies that leads to discovery.
Our research centers on four major thrusts:
Cognition & Visualization: What do people see when they look at a visualization? How does that information translate to insight and knowledge? We conduct empirical studies to model the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in data interpretation to create more scalable and effective visualizations.
Building Better Visualizations: How can visualizations best help people make sense of data? How can we facilitate more effective visualization design? We use insight from empirical studies and user-centered design to create novel systems for designing visualization tools and for novel insight into data across a broad variety of domains.
Systems for Human-Machine Collaboration: How might people and machine learning algorithms work collaboratively to explore data? How might systems provide a dynamic bridge between ML's scalability and human expertise? We study how visualization can facilitate transparent insight into machine learning and build systems to leverage these techniques to support collaborative analysis and decision making.
Novel Interfaces for Data: How might designers best leverage new interface technologies to explore data? What new insights and opportunities do these technologies afford? We design novel visualization systems for mobile and mixed reality devices to integrate data and decision making into the real world.
See our Projects page for details and links to past and on-going projects.
We are always open to new researchers and new collaborations. Join a diverse cohort of students as part of an interdisciplinary community ranked in the top ten for HCI research. For more information about the available projects, see our listing of open positions or contact Dr. Szafir directly.
News from the Lab:
08.2023: Two papers accepted to AIAA SciTech Forum.
08.2023: Bae was selected for the 2023 EECE Rising Stars.
08.2023: Bae et al.'s "A Computational Design Pipeline for Sensing Network Physicalizations" and Jeon et al.'s "CLAMS: Cluster Ambiguity Measure for Estimating Visual Perception" received Best Paper Honorable Mentions at IEEE VIS.
07.2023: Wu & Szafir's "Empowering People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities through Cognitively Accessible Visualization" accepted to VisComm.
06.2023: Three papers accepted to IEEE VIS.
06.2023: Ware, Szafir, & Stone's "Rainbow Colormaps are Not All Bad" accepted to IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications.
05.2023: Wu received an NCWIT Computing Collegiate Award Honorable Mention.
05.2023: Thomas & Szafir's ""Evaluating User Trust in Active Learning Systems" accepted to CHI TRAIT.
01.2023: Two papers accepted to ACM CHI.
10.2022: Quadri received IEEE VIS Best Dissertation Award.
10.2022: Szafir received IEEE VIS Early Career Researcher Award.
