VIS Executive Committee (VEC) Candidates
The VIS Executive Committee (VEC) oversees the planning and success of IEEE VIS. The VEC solicits bids for future VIS conferences, is involved in their planning, and evaluates how well each VIS has achieved its objectives. The VEC makes proposals for change for ratification by the VSC, and implements improvements to better meet conference objectives. It approves associated events, proposes most OC positions, and works with the OC to deliver the conference.
The VEC provides oversight and planning for the VIS conference as described in the VIS Charter.
The 2023 candidates for the VEC are:
Leilani Battle
As an active member of multiple research communities, I have a unique, interdisciplinary perspective on what makes our community a special and vibrant environment for fostering new research ideas. I attended my first VIS conference in 2015 and have been an active member of the VIS community for eight years. I have co-organized the Data Systems for Interactive Analysis (DSIA) workshop @ VIS, I co-founded the Visualization for Social Good (Vis4Good) Workshop @ VIS, and have served on the PC for VIS, EuroVis, and the CHI visualization subcommittee. I support open and transparent research practices, which I hope to contribute positively to as an associate editor for the Journal of Visualization and Interaction (JoVI). I also submit to and serve on the PC/OC for top database conferences such as SIGMOD and VLDB. My experience also reveals opportunities to grow our community in a way that preserves our values and goals, such as by transferring ideas across conferences on how to further promote community diversity and research replicability. If elected to the VEC, I will focus on supporting efforts along three fronts. As a woman of African American and Asian descent, a second generation US immigrant, and a graduate of a non-visualization group, I understand how one could feel like an outsider to VIS in terms of professional, intellectual, and personal identity. Thus, I seek to promote an inclusive and diverse community at VIS, such as through opportunities to encourage researchers from underrepresented groups to participate in and present their work at VIS. With my past experiences in conducting replicable research outside of visualization (e.g., earning SIGMOD’s replicability badge), I will also support new and existing initiatives to promote open, transparent, and replicable research at VIS. As I maintain an active role within and outside of visualization, I will also promote opportunities for our community to strengthen connections across multiple areas of computer science, including but not limited to databases, HCI, software engineering, and machine learning.
Evanthia Dimara
I’m a tenured assistant professor at Utrecht University. My vision for VIS is rooted both internally and externally - within and outside our community. Internally, my priority is to ensure that everyone feels welcome, especially those who are new or come from less privileged economic, cultural backgrounds, and identities. I firmly support open science and will strive to reward initiatives that promote such practices, ensuring these initiatives do not disproportionately affect our less privileged members. As for the conference experience, I aim to create an intellectual environment that encourages open discussions, a space where everyone leaves with new ideas, feedback, and potential collaborations. Externally, my goal is to carve out a more distinct space for our visualization community within the international research landscape, highlighting its unique role amidst other fields such as AI, HCI, and Computer Science, while simultaneously seeking ways to foster collaboration across a broad spectrum of disciplines, opening the door for new perspectives, methodologies, and ideas. Throughout my career, I’ve taken on multiple roles within our community: a dedicated reviewer, an organizer for the VIS conference for three consecutive years, a chairperson for two workshops, a member of both the full and short VIS paper committees for several years, and, most recently, an associate editor for TVCG. I hope my observations from these experiences will appear beneficial in my work with the VEC.
Mennatallah El-Assady
I am honored to have been nominated for the VEC; thank you! The VIS conference has been the primary scientific venue for my research, and I have been an active community member for ten years, attending and contributing to every conference since 2013. I have also co-founded and co-organized several workshop series, notably VIS4DH and VISxAI. Lastly, I have served as a member of both the program and organizational committees for several years. The VIS community has a distinct and exciting opportunity to establish itself as the primary scientific discipline for studying interactive data analysis processes, not just through visual but also through verbal and other communication mediums. In addition, growing our knowledge, methods, and best practices on how such interactive communication interfaces and workflows can facilitate human-AI collaboration will solidify the broad-range impact of our community. With this vision in mind, I would like to work together with the community to foster a productive environment for research and broader outreach. As a member of the VEC, I would also like to explore topics such as shared tasks, communal engineering, replicability tracks, methodology discourse, and many other subjects. In addition, I want to promote our ongoing endeavors as a community to establish open scientific practices. I want to encourage our community’s diversity and equality, specifically reaching out to underrepresented research demographics and institutions. Lastly, I want to put our environmental responsibility and sustainability on the agenda of the VEC to consider how the community can promote international networking while being conscious of our environmental impact and footprint.
Filip Sadlo
I have been an active member of the visualization research community for 29 years. I have co-chaired numerous visualization events and served on numerous program committees in the field, including IEEE VIS and EuroVis. Since 2022, I have served on the IEEE VGTC Executive Committee as a Member-at-Large, where I enjoy the opportunity to serve not only IEEE VIS, but also IEEE VR. I am probably best known for my dedication and for not being afraid to take on difficult and demanding tasks. One of my most recent and challenging endeavors has been to refine the two-entry review process for the EGPGV workshop. This process provides two submission deadlines for one venue, giving authors more flexibility and increasing the number of submissions. In addition, and more importantly, it allows for a major revision, which increases the overall quality of the final publications and gives a chance to promising papers that need more than a minor revision. I see great potential in such two-entry review process and would be happy to help explore the extent to which it can be established at IEEE VIS. Beyond that, I would be happy to help where possible.