We are seeking new members to join our team!
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
CommunityClick: Capturing and Reporting Community Feedback from Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity
Mahmood Jasim, Pooya Khaloo, Somin Wadhwa, Amy X. Zhang, Ali Sarvghad, Narges Mahyar.
CSCW 2020 
Paper
The Curse of Knowledge in Visual Data Communication
Cindy Xiong, Lisanne Van Weelden, Steven Franconeri.
TVCG 2020 Paper
Designing Technology for Sociotechnical Problems: Challenges & Considerations
Narges Mahyar, Mahmood Jasim, Ali Sarvghad.
CG&A 2020 Paper
How to Evaluate Data Visualizations across Different Levels of Understanding
Alyxander Burns, Cindy Xiong, Steven Franconeri, Alberto Cairo, Narges Mahyar.
BELIV 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, 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, 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, Steven Dow
CHI 2018 Paper
Embedded Merge & Split: Visual Adjustment Of Data Grouping
Ali Sarvghad, Bahador Saket, Alex Endert, Nadir Weibel
TVCG 2018 Paper
News
- Prof. Mahyar was selected as a 2020–2021 UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellow!
- Our lab had 5 papers accepted this summer, including to CSCW and BELIV.
- We are excited to introduce Prof. Cindy Xiong as our newest HCI-VIS member. She will join us in Fall 2021.
- Prof. Sarvghad had a paper accepted in IEEE VIS 2020!
- Prof. Mahyar & Sarvghad served on the PC for IEEE VIS short papers.
- RisingEmotions was selected as a CODAawards Top 100 project!
- Mahmood Jasim passed his portfolio evaluation – Congrats Mahmood!
- Prof. Mahyar will be a paper co-chair for ACM Creativity and Cognition 2021.
- Two papers to appear in Late-Breaking Work – CHI 2020
- Workshop on Sketching Visualisations: A hands-on introduction to data literacy
- Prof Mahyar served as Fast Forward Co-Chair for IEEE VIS 2019
Invited Guests
- Leo Liu (Feb 2020)
- Sheelagh Carpendale (Jan 2020)
- Cindy Xiong (Dec 2019)
- Amy Zhang (Feb 2019)