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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 28d

We will be covering transportation and lodging (shared room with other participants) for up to 4 participants. Preference will be given to individuals who’ve run studies with reVISit before.

To express interest, e-mail [email protected]

To learn about reVISit, visit revisit.dev

Home | ReVISit

reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

revisit.dev

Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 28d

The reVISit team will be hosting an open hackathon at TU Graz in Austria, immediately after IEEE VIS from Monday November 10 to Wednesday November 13. Anyone interested in contributing to reVISit is invited to participate!

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 28d

We will be covering transportation from Vienna and three nights in a hotel (shared room with other participants) for up to 4 participants. Preference will be given to who's run studies with reVISit before.

To express interest, e-mail [email protected]

To learn about reVISit, visit revisit.dev

Home | ReVISit

reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

revisit.dev

Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Aug 26

Tingying He, Maggie McCracken, Daniel Hajas, Sarah Creem-Regehr.

Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Aug 26

We created educational tactile versions of UpSet plots, clustered heatmaps, violin plots, and faceted line charts. In interviews, BLV participants said these models helped them build stronger mental models than textual explanations alone.

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Aug 26

Can 3D-printed tactile charts help blind and low-vision users understand complex visualizations? Yes, and they are a preferred learning method.

Read Tingying's blog post to see how it works and what we learned: www.visdesignlab.net/blog/2025/08...

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

lnkd.in

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

Kerry Kole @merrykerry.bsky.social · Aug 4

"if we had a million pounds we could get a working robot in ten years"
1966
youtu.be/T282C7cjWwg?...

1966: ROBOT HOUSEKEEPERS Coming Soon | Tomorrow's World | Past Predictions | BBC Archive

YouTube video by BBC Archive

youtu.be

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Jul 30

My new (and old) university TU Graz interviewed me about my return to Austria. Check it out; available in English and German.

www.tugraz.at/news/artikel...

Alexander Lex: Wie können Daten besser kommuniziert werden?

Alexander Lex beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie sich die Interaktion zwischen Mensch und Computer verbessern lässt – insbesondere in der Visualisierung und Accessibility.

www.tugraz.at

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

Nils Kroemer @nbkroemer.bsky.social · Jul 2

When I started @neuromadlab.bsky.social in 2017, we decided to publish all empirical papers as preprints. It helped us gain traction in the early days and avoid the kind of gate keeping of less convenient results. The benefits far outweighted any potential risk. I never regretted preprinting.

Katherine Brown @katherine-brown.bsky.social · Jul 1

Hard to remember that just 12 years ago there was no @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social and almost no one in the biology community preprinted their work. What a long way we’ve come. @reinierprosee.bsky.social and I wrote a thing about how @biologists.bsky.social embraced the preprint world

Staying ahead of the curve: a decade of preprints in biology

When Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory announced the launch of bioRxiv in November 2013, only the braver or more radical amongst us would have predicted that it heralded a lasting change within the scienc...

journals.biologists.com

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

Hendrik Strobelt @henstr.bsky.social · Jun 11

It's on! In its 8th year, the original VISxAI workshop wants your contributions for explaining ML/AI/GenAI principles. Please consider to submit.

Deadline: July 30
webpage: visxai.io

#ML #AI #GenAI #Visualization

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

Andrew McNutt @mcnuttandrew.bsky.social · Jun 10

We all love upset plots (the best way to represent set data), but how do we make them accessible to everyone?

To answer this we { @maggiemccracken.bsky.social, @alex-lex.bsky.social, and others } developed a system (and ran a bunch of studies) to figure it out!

vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2025/06...

Making Data Visualizations Talk: Accessible Text Descriptions for UpSet Plots

Data visualizations in scientific journals are essential for understanding the content of an article. However, visualizations typically are inaccessible for blind or low-vision users. A common remedy ...

vdl.sci.utah.edu

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Jun 4

If you're at EuroVis, join us for our reVISit tutorial tomorrow at 9 to learn about how to make powerful online user studies! diglib.eg.org/items/765579...

Running Online User Studies with the reVISit Framework

There currently are two main approaches for running online user studies: experimenters can use commercial survey tools, which are easy to use but can be costly, hamper reproducibility, and have limita...

diglib.eg.org

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

Robert Rohde @rarohde.bsky.social · May 9

~45% of US corn production is now used to make ethanol, mostly for mixing into gasoline.

That's ~13% of all US crop land already used for energy production.

Using some of the same land for solar panels would capture 50-100 times more energy per acre.

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 30

If you're curios about how reVISit can help you run your user studies, join us for a meetup at #CHI2025 tomorrow from 9:00-10:30 in Room G218!

revisit.dev

Home | ReVISit

reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

revisit.dev

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 29

Maxim Lisnic is having a busy day presenting two #chi2025 papers on "guardrails against cherrypicking" and on "composing text in dashboard tools". Max is on the job market for PostDocs and academic positions. Talk to him if you're hiring!

vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications...
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · Apr 23

good vis design is a lot harder an optimization problem than the data-ink ratio makes it seem, and talking about it as if it were that simple has misled many people into confidently creating bad charts, including Tufte

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 23

I’ll be joining the Institute of Human-Centred Computing – hcc.tugraz.at – and look forward to new collaborations with the fantastic team there.
I’ll stay closely connected to Utah, continuing my work with the amazing team at the SCI Institute and the Kahlert School of Computing.

hcc.tugraz.at

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 23

After an incredible decade at the University of Utah, I’m happy to share that I’ll be returning to my alma mater, TU Graz, this fall as a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction.

I’ll be hiring a PhD student and a PostDoc in Graz—if you're interested in HCI and visualization get in touch!

The clock tower of Graz and the city in the background.

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 23

Check out SCI's contributions to #CHI2025 this year, including two papers and a course from our lab.

Can guardrails mitigate cherry picking in data explorers?
vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications...

Can you do Think Aloud studies on crowdsourced platforms?
vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications...

Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute @uusci.bsky.social · Apr 21

SCI has a growing presence at @chi.acm.org, the top conference on human-computer interaction. Our #CHI2025 contributions: 4 papers, 1 of which won hon. mention (kudos to @mcnuttandrew.bsky.social), along with a course & a paper in the boundary-pushing alt.chi forum.
www.sci.utah.edu/the-institut...

SCI Marks One of Its Biggest Presences at Top Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

www.sci.utah.edu

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 11

We’ll also hold an in-person get-together for course participants and anyone interested in reVISit in Room G218, 9:00–10:30am on Thursday, May 1.

Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 11

Course details:
Title: Running Online User Studies with the reVISit Framework
Mounday, Apr 28, 11:10 AM – 5:50 PM (with breaks)
Session links:
programs.sigchi.org/chi/2025/pro...
programs.sigchi.org/chi/2025/pro...
programs.sigchi.org/chi/2025/pro...

Conference Programs

programs.sigchi.org

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 11

Going to #CHI2025 in Japan? Interested in running user studies?

Sign up for our virtual CHI 2025 course that teaches you how to use reVISit, a new, open-source user study tool reducing the tedium of study design. Come learn through some practical examples.

cvent.me/g5mx2w
revisit.dev

A screenshot of the reVISit interface showing the answers and provenance from a participant who completed the question. The study shown is a replication of He et al.’s pattern design study.

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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · Apr 9

It’s the time of the year when students accepted to graduate programs make decisions on where to go, while others might still be anxiously waiting to hear back. Unfortunately, the grad admissions process is opaque, so I’ve written a post that gives background: vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2025/04...

Reading Between the Lines: The US Computer Science Graduate Admission Process

It’s the time of the year that prospective graduate students have to commit to a particular computer science graduate program. Those that got multiple offers are in the envious position to be able to ...

vdl.sci.utah.edu

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · Apr 8

Most of the world’s foreign aid comes from governments, not philanthropic foundations

A bar graph titled "More than 95% of foreign aid comes from governments, rather than private donors" illustrates the distribution of foreign aid in 2023. The left portion shows a large maroon bar labeled "Foreign aid from governments," reaching $232 billion. The right section features a smaller tan bar labeled "Foreign aid from private donors," indicating $11 billion. A note beside the tan bar states that 4.5% of foreign aid came from private philanthropic donors. The footnote specifies that "Private donors" refers to philanthropic foundations reporting to OECD and excludes many individual charity donations or private investments. The data source is attributed to OECD (2024) and indicates that the information is shared under a Creative Commons BY license.

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Reposted by Alexander Lex

jonathan zong @jonathanzong.com · Mar 31

Tactile charts are an important tool for conveying data to blind and low vision people via embossed paper. However, tactile charts require high levels of time and expertise to design.

Introducing Tactile Vega-Lite, new work at #CHI2025 led by MIT SM student Katie Chen

news.mit.edu/2025/making-...

A new way to make graphs more accessible to blind and low-vision readers

Designed to help blind and low-vision readers understand graphics, the “Tactile Vega-Lite” system from MIT CSAIL converts data into a standard visual graph and a tactile chart. Accessibility standards...

news.mit.edu

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