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 2021 candidates for the VEC are:
Rita Borgo
I joined IEEE VIS as a student volunteer in my first year of PhD and I have been actively engaged in the community ever since. I have served as VIS Meetups Chair, PC member of both InfoVis and Vast, and IPC member of SciVis. I have volunteered as reviewer for TVCG and organized VIS co-located Workshops and Panels. I have been a member of IEEE since my Senior year at College. I am currently leading the Human Centred Computing Group at King’s College London and acting as Full Papers Chair for Eurovis.
VIS as a research venue and community has been an integral part of my development and pursuit of excellence in professional life. Engagement in the VIS community and beyond has given me better insights to understand relevant areas with potential for development. I wish to see such an event grow and to support its organisation across three main objectives: 1) develop a diverse and inclusive community to foster interdisciplinary work and create opportunities for minorities and less represented communities; 2) build openings for early-career research development of skills in areas such as leadership as well as publishing; 3) support our reviewers whose volunteering work underpins VIS standing as a venue of research quality and excellence.
Stefan Bruckner
As an active participant, contributor, and organizer that has been a member of our community for over 15 years (see https://vis.uib.no/team/bruckner/), I care deeply about it and would like to further devote my efforts to its growth and development. I am willing to take on and carry through tasks and believe to be able to constructively engage in the governance of VIS.
One of my main goals is to continue the process of fostering democracy, transparency, and diversity within our community. While we have made a lot of progress with respect to this in the past years (this election, for instance, is a good example), I believe there are still plenty of areas in need of improvement and I am devoted to engaging in further initiatives towards increased inclusivity and openness. This naturally includes aspects such as gender, ethnic background, and geography, but also extends to academic lineages and schools of thought. I also strongly support further developments towards open science. Despite several efforts in the community, here we still lag behind other fields, and it is critical that we bring together all stakeholders in order to find forward-looking solutions that go beyond the mere toleration of publicly available preprints. As the premier scientific event in our field, VIS has an important responsibility in signaling minimum standards and best practices in terms of reproducibility, replicability, and availability of all scientific artifacts and this is an important challenge that we need to address.
Michael Correll
I am a Senior Research Scientist at Tableau Research, where my work focuses on the ethical, accurate, and responsible communication of data, as well as graphical perception, the digital humanities, statistical graphics, and uncertainty visualization. I have been an organizer of associated events at VIS like Visualization for the Digital Humanities and Visualization for Social Good, as well as serving the VIS OC.
I believe VIS is at an inflection point around issues of accessibility, open science practices, and inclusivity. We have both an opportunity and a responsibility to make dramatic changes to the way we think of VIS moving forward: a VIS unconstrained by geography or publisher paywalls, and where we are cognizant of the social and ethical impacts, both positive and negative, that our work has on the world, and where differing voices and perspectives are welcomed. My plan of attack is on both the model of VIS attendance (affording virtual but inclusive forms of attendance even after it is safe to hold in-person events) and the model of VIS publication (with rolling deadlines that place less stress on students, alternative models and forms of publication, and consistent and standardized practices of open access and open science).
Helwig Hauser
Being an active long-term member of the visualization research community (>200 publications, h-index ~60 according to Google Scholar, …), I have a natural interest in the positive and successful development of our main events (with IEEE VIS undoubtedly being the most important of them all). My extensive experience from a wide variety of community services, including my current role as Editor in Chief of Computer Graphics Forum, the chairing and organization of numerous visualization events (for ex., as IEEE InfoVis Paper Chair in 2013 & 2014) as well as my service on a number of related Steering Committees (e.g., the EuroVis Steering Committee), could be a valuable contribution to the VEC’s main task to oversee the IEEE VIS organization.
Filip Sadlo
I have been active in visualization research since three decades, and am an active member of the subcommunity formerly known as scientific visualization, with a focus on flow, features, and topology. I served on numerous program committees, and, during the last six years, I have co-chaired 14 visualization events.
As there is a good side to everything, I believe that the COVID-19 situation offers various opportunities for improving the way we research, publish, and meet. However, substantial commitment is required to develop and also maintain seamless hybrid and augmented formats. I think that such activities would complement unification and equality in the context of reVISe very well, and I would be happy to also contribute in that field.