Ana Crisan
amcrisan.bsky.social
Ana Crisan
@amcrisan.bsky.social
Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo. I try to help people make informed decisions with data. #HCI, #Viz, applied #AI/#ML.
What are vision language models considering when attempting to answer a question from a chart image? I am pleased to announce that our recent work exploring this topic has been accepted to #IEEE #VIS. Check out the pre-print below and see you in Vienna: arxiv.org/abs/2504.05445
Probing the Visualization Literacy of Vision Language Models: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate promising chart comprehension capabilities. Yet, prior explorations of their visualization literacy have been limited to assessing their response correctness ...
arxiv.org
July 16, 2025 at 5:59 PM
I told the students in my class that timelines used to chronological (e.g, not algorithmically curated) and they were surprised. Watching the internet evolve is now wisdoms I impart…
May 27, 2025 at 6:28 PM
This was a fun paper to write and a fun collaboration.
Excited to announce my final alt.chi paper! @amcrisan.bsky.social and I ask the question many are too afraid to ask: "are community notes attached to posts about visualizations linters"? we find that the answer is complicated!

arxiv.org/abs/2502.07649
April 25, 2025 at 12:37 AM
If we’re writing really long documents that no one wants to write and also no one wants to read, then what is being accomplished with ChatGPT besides procedural performance?
Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York now running for mayor of New York City, released a housing plan that originally included a garbled section with incomplete sentences and a link to a citation retrieved by ChatGPT.
Cuomo Announces New Housing Plan, With a Hint of ChatGPT
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 29-page housing plan included a garbled section with incomplete sentences and a link to a citation retrieved by ChatGPT.
www.nytimes.com
April 14, 2025 at 7:22 PM
🚨 New Pre-print: Probing the Visualization Literacy of Vision Language Models: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

arxiv.org/abs/2504.05445
Probing the Visualization Literacy of Vision Language Models: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate promising chart comprehension capabilities. Yet, prior explorations of their visualization literacy have been limited to assessing their response correctness ...
arxiv.org
April 9, 2025 at 1:17 PM
We are seeking individuals to participate in a survey study to understand people's attitudes on collaborative data analysis and AI-assisted data analysis. The survey will take approximately 25 minutes: uwaterloo.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_.... #datascience #genAI #datawork #collaboration
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uwaterloo.ca1.qualtrics.com
April 7, 2025 at 5:09 PM
An unexpected part of teaching a course on Human-AI interaction is that many students critique papers based upon techniques that could not exist at the time the paper was written. They are quite knowledgeable of the current methods, but, teaching them how we got here has been interesting.
March 12, 2025 at 1:36 PM
I feel a few of the class discussions with my students this term are “in the before times of AI, here’s how X was done”
When you feel the need to say “I’m an old school nlp/data scientist not an AI hypester” despite—well. I do care about accuracy.
March 7, 2025 at 2:33 PM
When I was working with the BC CDC I saw first hand (and for the first time) all the work that dedicated public servants do to keep many critical things running. Politicians are one thing, public servants are another. We can get by without the former but probably not without the latter.
This comment on r/fednews really stood out to me. Trump and Musk want people to think they're firing do-nothing "bureaucrats," but they're really getting rid of people dedicated to serving this country and keeping it operational. I hope these stories get told.
February 14, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Even though it’s an interesting result, I am somewhat disheartened that research is now “add wait to the prompt and things get better”. I remember when genomics was “turn on the sequencer, get genome, get nature paper”, and while novel, those early genomes had tons of errors in the rush to publish.
Just read the s1: Simple Test-Time Scaling paper. Super interesting approach to improving reasoning models!

TL;DR:
1. SFT on 1k curated examples w/ reasoning traces.
2. Control response length w/ budget forcing:
"Wait" tokens → longer reasoning/self-correction.
"Final Answer:" → enforce stopping.
February 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Science twitter was why I used twitter. I missed loosing it and I am glad it looks like it’s reforming in a new space.
January 24, 2025 at 12:44 PM
This term I'll be teaching a graduate course on Human-AI Interaction. Check out the reading list and let me know if I am missing any of your favorites:

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

#HAI #Human-AI #HumanComputerInteraction
CS 889 - W25
[ CS 889 | W 2025] University of Waterloo © Anamaria Crisan (2025) Interfaces for Human-AI Interaction CS889 // Winter 2025 Instructor: Anamaria Crisan ([email protected]) Location: TBD Off...
docs.google.com
January 3, 2025 at 10:45 PM
This is delightful
My cover for today's A.I. issue of The New Yorker
more: www.christophniemann.com/detail/nyerc...
November 13, 2023 at 3:45 PM