VisGroup @ VIS 2025 (with 10 talks!)

Helwig Hauser and PhD students Hanna Balaka, Roxanne Ziman, and Amy Zhang travelled to the beautiful city of Vienna, Austria for the IEEE VIS Conference held this year from November 2-7, 2025. It was certainly a VIS to remember, with the VisGroup contributing 10 works/talks in total and connecting with new and old faces during workshops, coffee breaks, and especially at the grand reception in the Natural History Museum!

Hanna, Roxy, and Amy kicked the week off across five workshops ranging from visualizations for healthcare to emotional impact. Hanna presented The MoBa GWAS Explorer at the Visual Analytics for Healthcare (VAHC) workshop, looking at the design of approachable visualizations of GWAS data for a mixed audience based on her prior work [1]. Roxy presented her late-breaking work on Understanding Emotional Engagement for Data Visualization at the Visualization for Communication (VisComm) workshop.

At the alt.VIS workshop, Amy presented Data Melodification [2], a (sound) design space uniting musical rhetoric and sonification. Amy also collaborated on MRSight [OSF] which won Award of Merit for the Bio+MedVis redesign challenge as well as an agora talk on Deconstructing Statistical Peace [OSF] given by Shay at the Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH) workshop.

Helwig kicked off the full paper talks with CrossSet [arXiV], a novel method for the joint study of two set-typed dimensions for multivariate data. Later in the week, Helwig organized a meetup for robust statistics and sat in a panel on VIS reviewing practices.

Roxy presented the current landscape of genAI for BioMedVis practitioners and developers from her interview study: “It looks sexy but it’s wrong.” Tensions in creativity and accuracy using genAI for biomedical visualization [3]. Amy presented the plural meanings of data as truth and design for insight in her interview study: Deconstructing Implicit Beliefs in Visual Data Journalism [4].

Laura and Amy were also involved in a short paper led by Ibra that decoded the principles of Data Humanism for computer scientists [5]. In addition, Lucie David presented a poster on the patient engagement work she did with Noeska Smit.

And of course, the week would not be complete without trips around the cultural hub that is Vienna, including visits to the Josephinum medical history museum and Schönbrunn Palace (where the Christmas market is already in full swing).

[1] H. Balaka, L. A. Garrison, R. Valen, and M. Vaudel, MoBa Explorer: Enabling the navigation of data from the Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child cohort study (MoBa)The Eurographics Association, 2023.

[2] K. E. A. Zhang, D. Grellscheid, and L. Garrison, “Data Melodification FM: Where Musical Rhetoric Meets Sonification,” in Proceedings of alt.VIS workshop at IEEE VIS, 2025.

[3] R. Ziman, S. Saharan, G. McGill, and L. Garrison, “”It looks sexy but it’s wrong.” Tensions in creativity and accuracy using genAI for biomedical visualization,” arXiv, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics–in press, 2025.

[4] K. E. A. Zhang, J. Jenkinson, and L. Garrison, “Deconstructing Implicit Beliefs in Visual Data Journalism: Unstable Meanings Behind Data as Truth & Design for Insight,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics–in press, 2025.

[5] I. Al-Hazwani, K. E. A. Zhang, L. Garrison, and J. Bernard, “Data Humanism decoded: A characterization of its principles to bridge data visualization researchers and practitioners,” in Proceedings of IEEE VIS 2025 (Short Papers)–in press”, Los Alamitos, 2025.