2024 VIS Steering Committee (VSC) Candidates
The VIS Steering Committee (VSC) provides scientific and organizational oversight of IEEE VIS. It is the highest level committee at IEEE VIS and develops long term strategy and policy, appoints scientific content chairs, manages relationships with journals, ratifies specified VEC appointments and decisions, and oversees the evolution of the area model that defines the conference.
The VSC provides oversight and planning for the VIS conference as described in the VIS Charter.
The 2024 candidates for the VSC are:
Remco Chang
It is a great privilege to be nominated for a position on the VSC! I am a Professor in the Computer Science department at Tufts University and have been part of the VIS community since 2006. My contributions include serving as VIS General Chair (2024), VAST Papers Chair (2018, 2019), Associate Editor of TVCG (2021–present), Associate Editor of TiiS (2014–present), founding the VIS Summer Camp (2015–present), and co-founding the VIS Researcher Slack Channel (2016–present). If given the opportunity to serve on the VSC, I will aim to achieve two goals: (1) increase industry involvement in VIS, and (2) support the academic and industry careers of VIS researchers. The VIS conference has largely been an academic-focused conference with little industry participation. While commercial visualization companies have thrived (e.g., PowerBI, Looker, Sisense, SAS, Qlik, Oracle, R-Studio, Plotly), they have largely been absent from the VIS conference. As General Chair of VIS 2024, I have been working with the VEC to propose new publication mechanisms that will encourage these companies to contribute papers and participate in VIS activities. As a member of the VSC, I will have the opportunity to implement this multi-year effort. With the involvement of industry partners, I envision a VIS conference that supports the next generation of VIS researchers in both academic and industry careers. The VIS conference has traditionally supported academic careers through initiatives like the Doctoral Colloquium and VIS Summer Camp, but there is a need to bridge the gap with industry. Establishing a strong industry presence at VIS will provide valuable networking opportunities and bring practical insights from industry into academic research. As a member of the VSC, I will champion efforts to strengthen these academic-industry connections, ensuring the VIS conference becomes a hub for collaboration and innovation across both sectors.
Christoph Garth
I am honored and excited to be nominated for a position on VSC! As an active member of the VIS community for two decades, I have served in a variety of organizing committee roles, including Poster Chair and Short Paper Chair, among others; currently, I am an Area Paper Chair. As a member and chair of the reVISe committee and the subsequent Area Curation Committee, I helped restructure the V-I-S landscape into the unified VIS conference and area model that we have today. Moreover, I currently serve as an Associate Editor for TVCG. My research is rooted in scientific visualization. With my group, I develop solutions that help our collaborators from science and industry to understand large and complex datasets. In doing so, I enjoy drawing on and contributing to the wide and diverse spectrum of tools and techniques that the visualization research ecosystem is offering. I have recently developed a passion for reproducibility and FAIR research practices, and I am striving to understand how visualization research can benefit from these, while keeping the burden on individual researchers low. As a TVCG Replicability Stamp reviewer for the past five years, I have helped authors ensure that their work is reproducible. I strongly believe that the VIS conference is the foremost international forum to build our community, exchange scientific ideas and results, and understand the impact of our research. On VSC, I would be strongly committed to foster and promote these core aspects, while seeking to adapt to new topics and challenges, with the input of the community. I am convinced that VIS can grow in size, diversity, and inclusivity, while continuing to improve as a high-quality yet accessible scientific conference. In my view, fostering scientific community is an important part of every researcher’s role. I would be thrilled to be able to take on this responsibility on VSC.
Tim Dwyer
I am honoured and excited to be nominated for VSC. If I am elected I will work to grow the VIS conference’s international visibility, the inclusivity of its enthusiastic and diverse community, and its topic representation. I am a professor at Monash University, Australia. While writing this I have realised that 2024 represents my 20th year of contributing to the conference (since my first submission to the student competition in 2004). In that time I have seen VIS grow and change in many ways, but importantly it has retained a palpable air of excitement around helping people to see (or otherwise sense) and understand complex information. It’s that excitement around its topic, and a sense of shared vision for a future that allows people to better understand the world, that drew me into this conference series and community in the first place. If memory serves, I joined the (then InfoVis) program committee around 2006 and the organising committee in 2012, with two years each of tutorials, posters, and papers chairing. In 2019, I had the privilege to be part of the VIS restructuring workshops where the conference was refreshed into its current, multitrack format. Also in 2019, our bid to host VIS in Melbourne was accepted for 2022. After the pandemic caused us to push VIS Melbourne back to 2023, my co-general chairs (MIchael and Sarah) and I became (I believe) the longest serving incoming general chairs in VIS history, with nearly three joyous years of overnight core committee calls. Brushing away doubts about whether people were willing to attend a conference so far from North America and Europe, the Melbourne conference was a strong return to form after COVID with over 800 in-person attendees with many from the Asia-Pacific region able to join for the first time. As VSC member I would seek to further grow the VIS conference’s international reputation by reaching out to a wider audience - both geographically and topically. Internationalism is not just about taking VIS to new places. I would also strongly support ways for people who cannot travel to participate wherever they are. Inclusivity is also about making sure that as many good papers as possible, on a wide variety of topics, can be presented at VIS. Thank you again for the nomination and I hope I get the opportunity to serve this wonderful community further.
Enrico Bertini
I am honored to be nominated for the Visualization Steering Committee position. If elected, I will do my best to provide innovative and responsible thinking for the scientific and organizational future of IEEE VIS. I have been an active community member for almost 20 years, participating and contributing as a PhD student first and then as a postdoc and faculty. Over the years, I have covered several organizational positions and have organized several events (panels, workshops, etc.), including co-founding the successful BELIV Workshop on evaluation in visualization, which became a pre-approved event at IEEE VIS. I am an Associate Professor at Northeastern University, affiliated with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Art and Design. Previously, I was a faculty member at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. My research spans many areas of visualization, including applied, experimental, and theoretical work. Over the years, a large portion of my research has been devoted to the integration of automated and interactive methods in visualization. More recently, I have been focusing on the use of visualization as a way to understand the behavior of machine learning modes. I am a firm believer in the necessity of creating bridges between researchers and practitioners. For this reason, I have been active in building such bridges over the years. Most notably, in 2012, I started the Data Stories podcast (with Moritz Srefaner), which quickly became a major reference for the data visualization world across boundaries. If elected, I would be happy to promote initiatives that incentivize such exchanges and provide my expertise in the media space to expand the reach of IEEE VIS. In 2018, I developed an Information Visualization specialization for Coursera (made of 4 courses), providing training for thousands of people across the globe and contributing to educating people and supporting education across geographical boundaries. Education is crucial to training the future leaders of our community, and reaching people across geographical boundaries is essential to ensure everyone has a chance to contribute to our community. All these experiences, coupled with my long-standing contribution to visualization research, education, and outreach, can bring innovative elements and a unique outlook to IEEE VIS. I’d be delighted to make my experience available to the splendid IEEE VIS community to bring innovative elements and help sustain our future growth.
Paul Rosen
I would first like to thank the VIS community for trusting me to represent them on the VSC. I have attended the VIS conference most years since 2010 and consider it my academic home. I’ve had the opportunity to serve numerous VIS organizing roles, but those most relevant to this are as the VGTC secretary (2019-22), where, among other things, I was part of the subcommittee that modernized the VGTC awards, and as one of the VIS 2024 general chairs. I’m not in the habit of taking on a new service role without a clear sense of the impact I could make. As such, there are several issues that are important to me and that I would like to work on directly or at least advocate for, some of which are, undoubtedly, already receiving the attention of the VSC and VEC: (1) Our publication process is arcane, and we need a new model to improve the timely publication of VIS research while maintaining quality. The organization and timing of our deadlines cause papers to either take too long to be published (i.e., multiple submissions to VIS take years) or get pushed to other venues (e.g., CHI). (2) Create better connections with the practitioner community. We have been talking about engaging practitioners for (at least) a decade with limited success. This year, I have re-engaged the VIS conference with the Data Visualization Society, and I would like to continue to grow this and other practitioner relationships. (3) Long-term planning for the fiscal, format, and program future of the VIS conference. Having now organized the VIS conference, I have become aware of several issues with the VIS conference program that risk the future health of the conference. I care a lot about the VIS community, and I would like to see it grow and prosper. I hope by participating in the VSC, I’ll do my part to ensure the conference remains a relevant, thought-provoking, and engaging experience.
Michael Sedlmair
It is a great honor to be nominated for a position on the IEEE VIS Steering Committee (VSC). Thank you so much! I am currently a full professor in computer science at the University of Stuttgart, where I lead the research group for Visualization and Virtual/Augmented Reality (VisVAR) and am the managing director of the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems. I served in different roles on the IEEE VIS Organizing Committee as co-chair for publicity, panels, tutorials, posters, and area paper co-chair. I am an associate editor for TVCG, CGF, and JoVI, Visualization subcommittee co-chair at ACM CHI, and regularly serve on program committees of visualization (VIS, EuroVis, PacificVis, etc.) and related conferences (ACM CHI, IEEE ISMAR, ACM IUI, etc.). For the last 18 years, my research has focused on various topics at the intersection of visualization, human-computer interaction, virtual/augmented reality, and machine learning. Together with my group, we are currently pursuing projects in situated visualization, immersive analytics, visual and interactive machine learning, progressive visual analysis, music visualization, haptic feedback devices, assistive technologies, and accessibility. The visualization community has always been a welcoming and thriving place! Yet, there are also new challenges ahead, which I hope to contribute to if elected for the VSC. Examples include continuing to foster an inclusive and diverse VIS community (I am the diversity officer in our SimTech excellence cluster), increasing the impact in industry and society (I worked at BMW for 3.5 years), and promoting scalable and fair publication/review processes (can contribute my experience from other communities, such as ACM CHI and IEEE ISMAR). It would be an honor to help shape our community’s future as a VSC member. Thanks!