giCenter shines at IEEE VIS 2025 in Vienna

The GI Center wrapped up a successful week at IEEE VIS 2025 in Vienna, with a strong and inspiring presence across papers, posters, and presentations. Our team came back energized by a week of exciting research, discussions, and community connections.

Congratulations to Amir, whose paper “What do LLMs prioritize when adapting visualizations to user personas?” received Best Paper honors at the Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare!

We were also thrilled to see several GI Center researchers share their latest work:

• Maeve presented “Capturing Visualization Design Rationale.”

• Natalia presented “Human in the Loop: Visual Analytics for Building Models Recognizing Behavioral Patterns in Time Series.”

• Narges presented “CLAIMATE: AI-enabled Climate Change Communication through Personalized and Localized Narrative Visualization.”

Jason and Joe co-authored two additional papers:

• “Reframing Pattern: A Comprehensive Approach to a Composite Visual Variable.”

• “Constraint-Based Break Points for Responsive Visualization Design and Development.”

We also showcased two posters led by Radu and Dany, rounding out a week full of ideas and inspiration.

Beyond the sessions, the team enjoyed the conference reception at Vienna’s stunning Natural History Museum, and had plenty of fun connecting with the VIS community at parties and the VIS Rock concert.

We’re proud of everyone’s contributions and can’t wait to build on this momentum for next year.

CDT Launch

The Centre for Doctoral Training in Diversity in Data Visualisation (Diverse CDT) has welcomed its first cohort of 11 students, marking a major step in advancing diversity and innovation in data-driven research.

Bringing a wide mix of disciplinary and social backgrounds, the cohort will work collaboratively to explore how diverse perspectives can shape more inclusive data practices and visualisation approaches.

Diverse CDT is the first Centre for Doctoral Training led by City St George’s, delivered in partnership with the University of Warwick and with significant involvement from the giCentre. The programme moves beyond traditional one-to-one supervision, prioritising cohort-based learning, collaborative research, and engagement with community stakeholders.

Learn more about the programme and its mission on the Diverse CDT website.

Welcome to Our New giCentre Colleagues

We are pleased to welcome three new researchers to the giCentre, further strengthening our expertise in data visualisation and human-centred analytics.

Narges Mahyar
Narges’s work spans visualisation, HCI, social computing, and design, focused on enhancing people's ability to tackle complex problems. She develops and evaluates innovative systems that support better decision-making for experts and the public, with recent research centred on broadening civic participation in large-scale decision-making.

Alexis Pister
Alexis specialises in information visualisation, visual analytics, and network visualisation. He designs interactive systems for exploring complex data and has developed methods to visualise historical documents as social networks with an emphasis on traceability and explainability. His current work explores representations for dynamic hypergraphs.

Ali Sarvghad Batn Moghaddam
Ali researches visualisation and interaction techniques that support exploratory data analysis and sense-making. He also applies data visualisation approaches in domains such as healthcare and business to help users uncover insights from complex datasets.

Computer Graphics, Visualisation, and Visual Computing (CGVC) will be hosted by giCentre in London this September

We are hosting the 42nd annual conference on Computer Graphics, Visualisation, and Visual Computing (CGVC 2024) in London on 12th and 13th September.

Our programme is available. We have confimed keynotes from the excellent Petra Isenberg and Rachel McDonnell. We will have a special session on Human-centred Decision-Making through Data Visualisation, with talks on cutting-edge EPSRC-funded visualisation research across the UK. We will also have an “Vis in Practice” industry panel Our social events at the end of the first day will help you connect with others as different career stages in the field of visualisation and visual computing.

Registration is open. Please register!

Best Reviewer award for EuroVis 2024 for Jo Wood

Jo Wood was awarded Best Reviewer award for EuroVis 2024 for "strik[ing] an admirable balance between encouragement and constructive criticism" in a way that helps with "nurturing the growth of early-career researchers". Well done!

giCentre at EuroVis

Dany presented his short paper at Eurovis 2024 in Odense, Denmark. The work - supervised by Radu and Aidan and part-funded by AITL - focuses on the use of gridded-glyphmaps for the showing multivariate geospatial data used for multi-critieria decision-support. See the paper here.

Hello Mai!

We welcome Mai Elshehaly as a Lecturer in Visualisation at the giCentre.

Mai designs, develops and evaluates visual analytics for population health management with a particular interest in the role of routine data and digital footprints in decision-making.

An Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, Mai leads the visualisation stream at the Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Centre. She works closely with colleagues at local authorities and several partner organisations to deliver data literacy to over 30,000 young citizens in Bradford.

Mai received a PhD in Computer Science from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech, with a focus on scientific data visualisation. Her postdoctoral  research experience included NSF- and NIHR-funded fellowships at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and University of Leeds.

Check Mai’s publications to find out more about her exciting work in visualization and public health.