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About us

The HCI-VIS Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducts both fundamental and applied research at the intersection of HCI and Visualization. The mission of our Lab is to augment the abilities of individuals and groups to understand data and solve complex problems. We develop novel visualization and interaction techniques to facilitate data analysis, communication, and exploration. Additionally, we build community-centered tools to address real-world sociotechnical problems in domains such as civics and healthcare.

Focus & Excellence

The lab focuses its research on socially impactful technologies and techniques that include marginalized perspectives and empower data-informed decision-making. We value interdisciplinary work and utilize human-centered methods to understand people and design for them.

Culture

We strive to build an inclusive and human-centered environment where we value everyone’s unique properties, values, orientations towards meeting excellence in research. We commit to building a supportive and healthy community where we help each other by providing continuous feedback for improvements, participating in active collaboration and research, and celebrating our achievements.

Recent Publications

Exploring how Data Scientists Review Scholarly Literature. Sheshera Mysore, Mahmood Jasim, Haoru Song, Sarah Akbar, Andre Kenneth Chase Randall and Narges Mahyar. ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), To Appear, 2023.

CommunityBots: Creating and Evaluating A Multi-Agent Chatbot Platform for Public Input Elicitation. Zhiqiu Jiang, Mashrur Rashik, Kunjal Panchal, Mahmood Jasim, Ali Sarvghad, Pari Riahi, Erica DeWitt, Fey Thurber, Narges Mahyar. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), To Appear, 2023.
Preprint

Mapping Instability: The Effects of the Pandemic on the Civic Life of a Small Town. Erica Dewitt, Zhiqiu Jiang, Mashrur Rashik, Kunjal Panchal, Mahmood Jasim, Fey Thurber, Cami Quinteros, Ali Sarvghad, Narges Mahyar, and Pari Riahi, Environments By Design: Health, Wellbeing, and Place Conference, Organized by the Society for Sociology of Health, Syracuse University, Chalmers University of Technology, Northumbria University, AMPS proceeding Series 26.2, ISSN 2398-9467, pp. 170-181, 2022.
Paper

Of Course it’s Political! A Critical Inquiry into Underemphasized Dimensions in Civic Text Visualization. Eric PS Baumer, Mahmood Jasim, Ali Sarvghad, and Narges Mahyar, Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis) 2022, 14 pages, 2022.
Paper

ClioQuery: Interactive QueryOriented Text Analytics for Comprehensive Investigation of Historical News Archives. Abram Handler, Narges Mahyar and Brendan O’Connor, Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 40 pages, 2022.
Paper

Scientometric Analysis of Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Gender Trends in 30 Years of IEEE VIS Publications. Ali Sarvghad, Rolando Franqui-Nadal, Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, Ria Chawla and Narges Mahyar, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12 pages, 2022.
Paper

Supporting Serendipitous Discovery and Balanced Analysis of Online Product Reviews with Interaction-Driven Metrics and Bias-Mitigating Suggestions. Mahmood Jasim, Christopher Collins, Ali Sarvghad and Narges Mahyar, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), 2022, 31 pages.
Paper

Investigating Perceptual Biases in Icon Arrays. Cindy Xiong, Ali Sarvghad, Cagatay Demirlap, Jake M. Hofman, Deniel G. Goldstien, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), 2022, 12 pages.
Paper

A Framework for Open Civic Design: Integrating Public Participation, Crowdsourcing, and Design Thinking. Brandon Reynante, Steven P. Dow, and Narges Mahyar
ACM Journal for Digital Government 2021

Designing with Pictographs: Envision Topics without Sacrificing Understanding. Alyxander Burns, Cindy Xiong, Steven Franconeri, Alberto Cairo, and Narges Mahyar
TVCG 2021
Paper

RisingEMOTIONS: Bridging Art and Technology to Increase Public Engagement with Climate Change. Carolina Aragón, Mahmood Jasim, and Narges Mahyar
C&C 2021
Paper

CommunityPulse: Facilitating Community Input Analysis by Surfacing Hidden Insights, Reflections, and Priorities. Mahmood Jasim, Enamul Hoque, Ali Sarvghad, and Narges Mahyar
DIS 2021
Paper

CommunityClick: Capturing and Reporting Community Feedback from Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity
Mahmood Jasim, Pooya Khaloo, Somin Wadhwa, Amy X. Zhang, Ali Sarvghad, and Narges Mahyar.
CSCW 2020
Paper

Designing Technology for Sociotechnical Problems: Challenges & Considerations
Narges Mahyar, Mahmood Jasim, and Ali Sarvghad.
CG&A 2020
Paper

Rehabilitation Games in Real-World Clinical Settings: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities
Hee-Tae Jung, Taiwoo Park, Narges Mahyar, Sungji Park, Taekyeong Rye, Yangsoo Kim, and Sunghoon Ivan Lee
TOCHI 2020
Paper

The Civic Data Deluge: Understanding the Challenges of Analyzing Large-Scale Community Input
Narges Mahyar, Diana Nguyen, Maggie Chan, Jiayi Zheng, and Steven Dow
DIS 2019
Paper

CommunityCrit: Inviting the Public to Improve and Evaluate Urban Design Ideas through Micro-Activities
Narges Mahyar, Michael James, Michelle Ng, Reginal Wu, and Steven Dow
CHI 2018
Paper

Embedded Merge & Split: Visual Adjustment Of Data Grouping
Ali Sarvghad, Bahador Saket, Alex Endert, and Nadir Weibel
TVCG 2018
Paper

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