IEEE VIS 2021 Meetups

VisBuddies Meetup

Tuesday, October 26
14:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Hsiang-Yun Wu, Karen Schloss, Lane Harrison
Contact: community@ieeevis.org

VisBuddies brings together new and returning VIS attendees with similar interests. For newcomers, this is a chance to meet experienced researchers in the field. For returning attendees, it is a chance to meet fresh talent joining VIS for the first time. You can volunteer for VisBuddies on the registration form (the latest a week prior to VIS). Based on the declared interests of attendees in the registration form, we will match pairs or small groups of attendees with different levels of VIS experience, and contact the groups via email prior to VIS.

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Better Online Presentations Meetup

Tuesday, October 26
14:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Robert Kosara
Contact: kosara@tableau.com

We’ve all suffered through too many Zoom meetings and online talks over the last 18 months. And we’ll likely be doing this for a while longer. So how do you make your talk or lecture work when it’s virtual? How do you keep people’s attention? What mistakes make your talk boring or hard to listen to? The goal of this meetup is to talk about a variety of topics around virtual talks and online classes, and learn from each other. Topics will include:

  • Common mistakes we’ve all seen people make in presentations and how to avoid them. The idea is to become aware of them so you can avoid making them yourself!
  • Should you be visible all the time during your talk? What are the pros and cons?
  • Technical and setup questions, like types of microphones and cameras, how to keep audio and video in sync, etc.
  • Making the best use of your equipment with proper microphone and camera technique, etc.
  • Getting fancy with green screen, streaming software, teleprompters, etc.
  • The difference between a live talk and recording: basic editing, sound sweetening, etc.
  • Making it interactive: features built into software like Zoom, and other tools to use for polls, small-group collaboration, etc.
  • Anything else participants want to ask about or contribute

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VisLies! Meetup

Tuesday, October 26
15:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Kenneth Moreland and Bernice Rogowitz
Contact: bernice.e.rogowitz@gmail.com

VisLies! is a yearly event at IEEE VIS. This fun and engaging evening session showcases examples of egregious perceptual, cognitive, and conceptual errors in visualization, presented by members of the Vis community. Examples from our own work, from published papers, and from the internet highlight the many ways the visual representation can misrepresent the underlying phenomena in the data. This is a great opportunity for amusement and for learning, and every year we walk away with a smile on our faces and insights that may one day save the world.

For more information about VisLies, you can visit our website at http://vislies.org.

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VisComm Meetup

Wednesday, October 27
14:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Adriana Arcia
Contact: aa2594@cumc.columbia.edu

This informal gathering is an opportunity to network with others interested in using visualization for communication. We will also be unveiling the new VisComm community directory. Add yourself! https://forms.gle/68Fsqwn3PBZKihZz7

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Evaluating Complex Interactive Visualizations Meetup

Wednesday, October 27
14:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Carolina Nobre, Alexander Lex, Lane Harrison
Contact: cnobre@g.harvard.edu , alex@sci.utah.edu, ltharrison@wpi.edu

The goal of this meetup is to foster a discussion on how we, as visualization researchers, can better evaluate the complex interactive visualization (CIV) tools and systems we develop. The challenges of evaluating these systems include the several design decisions involved in developing CIVS, as well as the complexity and diversity of analysis strategies and abilities of the users of these interfaces. We plan on facilitating discussions along two main threads: (1) validating the design of CIVS, and (2) designing scalable experiments to evaluate CIVs.

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Gender Representation and Diversity at IEEE VIS Meetup

Wednesday, October 27
15:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Petra Isenberg, Natkamon Tovanich
Contact: natkamon.tovanich@inria.fr

Based on our empirical analysis on “Gender in 30 Years IEEE Visualization”, we would like to encourage a wide discussion on possible causes and solutions to gender gaps in the VIS community. The paper discusses numbers but does not suggest possible action - which we hope to start discussing as part of this meetup.

Beyond gender diversity, we would also like to discuss other diversity characteristics (e.g., research area, academic linage, demographic, etc.). We are interested in exploring ways to collect this kind of data and brainstorm new ideas to improve awareness and inclusion in the IEEE VIS conference.

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Job-fair Meetup

Thursday, October 28
15:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Hsiang-Yun Wu, Karen Schloss, Lane Harrison
Contact: community@ieeevis.org

The goal is to bring together job seekers and employers in one virtual venue to trade CV and employment information. Job seekers in attendance are asked to be prepared to share a link to their CV. Employers in attendance are asked to be prepared with job descriptions and details on how to apply. Employers are also encouraged to include their job postings on the IEEE VIS Job Fair site by submitting this form: https://forms.gle/d6V3u2s8d1TXcjXb9.

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Climate Change AI meets Vis Community: Engagement, Collaboration and Research Opportunities Meetup

Thursday, October 28
14:00:00 CDT
Organizer: Subhashis Hazarika, Peetak Mitra
Contact: shazarika@parc.com

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing life on earth. Scientists and engineers from different domains are joining forces with climate scientists to find solutions to a diverse set of socio-economic problems arising from climate change.

Climate Change AI (CCAI) is an organization composed of volunteers from academia and industry whose core mission is to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. CCAI is actively involved in building a community of diverse stakeholders, providing educational resources, and filling essential infrastructure gaps such as limited-term funding, tools for community engagement and collaboration, and datasets. They have also successfully organized a series of climate change workshops at top machine learning conferences like ICML, ICLR, and NeurIPS, and just launched a $1.8M grants program to catalyze research in this area.

The goal of this IEEE Vis meetup is to provide a platform for the visualization research community to interact with CCAI and identify possible engagement, collaboration, and research opportunities. We feel that the Vis research community has a lot to offer to further the mission of CCAI. In this meetup, we will have core committee members from CCAI talk about their organization and how to get involved at various levels.

If you are a visualization researcher (early-career or senior) and want to actively engage in climate change research, this will be an excellent networking platform.

Climate Change AI website: https://www.climatechange.ai/

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