2023 VIS Steering Committee (VSC) Candidates
The VIS Steering Committee (VSC) provides scientific and organizational oversight of IEEE VIS. It is the highest level committee at IEEE VIS and develops long term strategy and policy, appoints scientific content chairs, manages relationships with journals, ratifies specified VEC appointments and decisions, and oversees the evolution of the area model that defines the conference.
The VSC provides oversight and planning for the VIS conference as described in the VIS Charter.
The 2023 candidates for the VSC are:
Niklas Elmqvist
I am pleased to be nominated for the VSC, and if elected, I will work tirelessly to improve inclusivity, broaden the scope, and increase the impact of the visualization community. I am a full professor in computer science at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark where I lead the newly formed Center for Anytime Anywhere Analytics. Prior to this, I was a professor at University of Maryland, where I directed our HCI masters program and the HCIL research lab. I am an active researcher in the IEEE VIS community with contributions in ubiquitous and immersive analytics, novel devices and technologies, and accessible visualization. I see service to the scientific community as a vital part of my job as a faculty member. Accordingly, I have contributed countless hours of my time to serve in virtually all of the roles in the VIS organization committee, to participate in VIS program committees over many years, and to review innumerable visualization research papers. I have served as paper co-chair for IEEE VIS three times and as chair for the Visualization subcommittee at the ACM CHI conference twice, and I am currently a paper co-chair for IEEE PacificVis 2024. After close to twenty years in the visualization area, I am submitting my candidacy for the IEEE VIS Steering Committee to continue serving the community. Thank you!
Alex Endert
It’s with great excitement that I write this after hearing I’ve been nominated for a position on the VSC. Thank you for this opportunity! I’ve been an active member of the VIS community since I was a PhD student in 2008. I’ve served on numerous organizing committee roles at the conference, ranging from being a student volunteer (for “VisWeek” back in the day), to Poster Chair, APC Chair, Workshops Chair, Co-General Chair, and others. I’m actively an associate editor for TVCG and regularly serve as a PC member at venues including VIS, EuroVis, and CHI. I was a member of the reVISe committee to restructure the conference into the unified VIS area model we see today, and the Area Curation Committee which monitors the status of how well the areas cover the topics of papers submitted. My research interests include building visual analytic tools that help people make sense of data and AI. My students and I create tools that blend human and machine agency and study how this impacts cognition and sensemaking. We often deploy our research in practice in various domains. Outside of work, I enjoy golf and coffee (usually not at the same time). In terms of VSC, I believe the community of VIS thrives when it fosters and respects a diverse set of people and research topics. This is challenging to achieve and maintain. Research topics change as technology advances, researchers who engage in cross-disciplinary research draw closer to different communities over their careers, and understanding how a conference can stay flexible and agile to adjust is critical. Thus, I am honored to be nominated for the VSC, and I will strongly support efforts to listen to feedback from all members of the community as we continue to improve VIS.
Vidya Setlur
I feel privileged and grateful to be nominated for a position on the VSC. Thank you. For over 18 years, I have been an active member and contributor to the visualization and graphics community at large, having served as a program committee member for VIS, EuroVis, UIST, Siggraph, and IUI, papers co-chair for UIST, co-organizer of the NLVIZ workshop for several years, and currently, a supporters co-chair for VIS. With the support of excellent collaborators in the community, a key contribution of my research has been in the area of natural language interaction and language understanding, semantics, and meaningful visual depiction of data. Having worked in industry research my entire career - Nokia Research followed by Tableau Research, much of my work explores ways to be an effective liaison between research and industry through innovation and productization. Being a woman of color and having started my research journey in computer graphics and natural language processing, I have leaned into the VIS community to develop and grow as a researcher. I strongly believe that VIS can continue to evolve and thrive through the inclusivity of diverse members of the community and interdisciplinary thinking. As we step into the era of large language models, along with new experiences and approaches for seeing and understanding data, I envision VIS playing a greater role in today’s world by embracing data literacy with a social responsibility for exploring pertinent and impactful topics. I intend to support and promote the VIS conference and community by finding pathways between academia and industry so that we continue to stay relevant and impactful. I also have a special interest in teaching visualization to under-served students and mentoring upcoming researchers in the field, with a focus on supporting women and minority groups to find meaningful ways to be part of the VIS community.
Anders Ynnerman
I am deeply honored to be nominated by colleagues to serve on the IEEE VIS Steering Committee. The most rewarding academic recognition is the one expressed by peers. Thank you! I am currently professor at Linköping University where I am heading the research division in Media and Information Technology. I am also the founding director of the Norrköping Visualization Center C, which hosts a public science center, with exhibits and a dome theater. I am very pleased to have been invited to give the keynote address at this year’s VIS conference, together with Drew Berry, to talk about our work on bringing biomolecular visualization to the dome. My research has over the years focused on fundamental aspects of visualization and interaction with a strong multidisciplinary component. This has generated results advancing visualization in areas such as medical volume rendering, multimodal and large scale display systems, and decision support environments. A primary focus has been visualization for public spaces. During my academic career I have served on the editorial boards of IEEE TVCG, IEEE CG&A, CAG and have been scientific co-chair (e.g., IEEE SciVis 2013, 2014, EuroVis 2007), and general chair (e.g., EuroVis 2007, EG 2010, EGEV 2020) of leading conferences. I have served on the steering committees for both SciVis and EuroVis (chair until 2021). I also chaired the EuroGraphics Association 2014-2016. Of importance in this context is that I was a member of the reVISe committee and one of the Overall Papers Chairs for VIS 2021 and 2022. If elected to the VSC I will, in the spirit of the reVISe work, promote actions to increase the unified impact of the visualization community. IEEE VIS as the primary venue for our community can pave the way for new ways of promoting our work and put it in the context of neighboring and flourishing communities, which entails being open to a wider range of contributions based on multidisciplinary research on technology, methodology and applications. I am also convinced that we need to rethink the publication tradition and the role of conferences in our field. I believe that conferences should focus even more on community building activities and stimulate vibrant scientific communication and exchange. Our community has the potential, and deserves, to grow. We need to discuss how we can put the framework and actions in place that make this happen. Too many good VIS papers are rejected every year.