Prof. Huamin Qu Received the 2025 IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) Test of Time Award

Prof. Huamin Qu of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) has received the 2025 IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) Test of Time Award for his 2010 paper, "Context-Preserving, Dynamic Word Cloud Visualization." The paper was co-authored with his then-students Weiwei Cui and Yingcai Wu, along with Shixia Liu, Furui Wei, and Michelle Zhou, who were researchers at IBM China Research Lab at the time. This marks the first time a paper originating from Asia has won this award.

The awarded paper

Traditional word clouds capture only a single snapshot of text, but Prof. Qu's team devised a way to track how content evolves over time. Their method generates a sequence of word clouds where semantically related terms stay grouped together across time steps, paired with a trend chart summarising overall content shifts. This approach let users visually trace how topics in large document collections rise, fall, or change, a technique that has since shaped text and visual analytics tools well beyond its original publication.

About the award

The IEEE CG&A Awards celebrate transformative contributions across computer graphics, visualization, virtual reality, and interactive techniques, spanning research excellence, editorial leadership, and peer review. Among these honours, the Test of Time Award, established in 2021, carries particular weight: it recognizes feature and special issue articles that have made significant and lasting contributions bridging the theory and practice of computer graphics, evaluated on both citation impact and lasting influence on emerging research directions.

Congratulations to Prof. Huamin Qu and the research team on this prestigious award!

Details: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) Awards - Test of Time Award

Prof. Huamin Qu received the 2025 IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) Test of Time Award

2025 IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) Test of Time Award certificate for Context-Preserving, Dynamic Word Cloud Visualization