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 2024 candidates for the VEC are:
Daniel Archambault
I am honoured to accept this nomination for the VEC. I’m a Professor of Visualisation/Data Science at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Visualisation has taken me many places around the world (France, Ireland, the UK, and my native Canada), and I hope it does the same for all of you as well. My first IEEE VIS conference was back in 2003 as a MSc student at UBC, and I’ve been attending regularly ever since. I’ve had the honour of serving as paper’s co-chair of both the European Conference on Visualization (EuroVis) and Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (also known as GD). I have also severed on the Steering Committee of GD, the Organising Committee of VIS, as an IEEE TVCG Associate Editor, and many times as a PC member of these conferences. This experience undoubtably will help me help in helping with future IEEE VIS organisation and planning. In my new role at Newcastle, I co-lead a group on Visualisation, Artificial Intelligence and Scalable Computing. I have great confidence that the excellent work published at our conference is integral to data science and AI, and I know that our field will embrace this challenge. I will continue to be an advocate for our participation in it. Through this leadership experience as well, I believe that I am well placed to foster a diverse visualisation community and an exciting international conference. If successful, I look forward to this challenge of planning and helping improve our great conference.
Alex Endert
I’m excited to hear that I’ve been nominated for a position on the VEC. Thank you all for the 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 VEC, I would look forward to contributing to the ongoing activities in the VEC. Thinking more strategically, I’m passionate about maintaining VIS as the type of venue where people from diverse backgrounds can publish and share their work. Through the various roles I have served on at VIS, I’m aware of the tremendous amount of effort that goes into hosting the conference and reviewing the papers submitted. I am open to finding more sustainable ways to manage this cost (both in terms of finances and workload). Thus, I am honored to be nominated for the VEC, and strongly support efforts to listen to feedback from all members of the community as we continue to improve VIS.
Hendrik Strobelt
I am a senior research scientist at IBM Research (MIT-IBM AI Lab) and work in visualization since 2007. Besides topical contributions in form of papers, I have contributed to the organization of VIS and other conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR. Along with some exceptional colleagues, I helped to create the VISxAI workshop — which we just handed over to a new generation of researchers. In 2022, together with Danielle Szafir and David Ebert, I served as “spontaneous” general chair for the VIS conference. Together, we created a successful first fully hybrid event after Covid. If elected, I would like to bring the practical knowledge to the table that I have gained over the last years in helping establishing and running these events. For VIS, I see great potential for sensible reforms to create a crisp and slick conference schedule with a large emphasis on human-human interaction on-site. In my view, traditions are important and very respectable. Yet, if we only rely on traditions we might not have space and time for progress. As VEC member, I would advocate for preserving traditions that resonate broadly within the community, but also for discontinuing those that no longer pass the test of time. This approach, imho, is essential for making room for new formats and new ideas, and, ultimately, for fostering a lively conference as the gathering place for a lively research community.
Charles Perin
VIS has been my academic home since 2012 - it is the first international conference I attended (it was actually my first travel outside of Europe), and since then I have always been involved with the conference, whether as a volunteer, an attendee, an author, a mentor, or an organizer. What I like most about VIS is that it is a place where there is room for experimentation, where it is possible to broaden our horizons, and to make new connections. I have had many organizational roles at VIS, ranging from student volunteer to student volunteer chair to VISAP chair to tutorials chair to short papers chair. I am also regularly on the PC for full and short papers, and am always happy to review for VIS events such as VISAP and workshops. I have co-organized six workshops at VIS in the past 10 years, including alt.vis, VIS futures, EduVis and one on first-person visualization this year. I think the workshops and associated events I have been involved with are a good indication that I am committed to pushing boundaries, exploring new topics, new presentation formats, new interdisciplinary spaces, and new types of scientific contributions. It is not a secret that I advocate for organizational transparency, support open and transparent research practices, as well as diversity of research methods and practices. As a member of the VEC, there are a few key topics I will prioritize: 1) facilitate broader participation, for example by following CHI’s registration model based on country categories; 2) support the implementation of mechanisms to improve research transparency, replicability, openness and scrutiny, as well as its recognition (e.g., through badges or awards); 3) recognize the cost of gathering the community in one place and make the most of it, by encouraging more interactive panels, workshops, working sessions and others over paper presentations; and 4) last but not least, research and implement strategies for making IEEE VIS environmentally and socially responsible and sustainable.