CSE Students YU Yue and SHEN Leixian Received IEEE VIS Best Short Paper Award

CSE students Yu Yue (left) and Shen Leixian (right) have received the IEEE VIS Best Short Paper Award.

We would like to congratulate CSE students YU Yue and SHEN Leixian for receiving the IEEE VIS Best Short Paper Award! Their research introduces PyGWalker, a library designed to simplify exploratory visual data analysis within computational environments.

The library bridges the gap between programmatic and visual analysis by providing an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface for creating visualizations directly from tools like Jupyter Notebooks. Developed in collaboration with Kanaries Data during Yue’s internship, PyGWalker supports both Python and R programming environments and accommodates diverse data sizes through its flexible architecture. Since its launch in 2023, the library has been widely adopted, with millions of downloads and over ten thousand stars on GitHub. Its applications span fields including education, meteorology, and urban studies.

The research reflects a close collaboration between academia and industry. YU Yue extends his gratitude to his co-author from HKUST, SHEN Leixian, and his supervisor, Prof. QU Huamin, with special thanks to his mentors at Kanaries Data, LONG Fei and CHEN Hao, for their invaluable guidance. Their collective efforts were instrumental in bringing PyGWalker to the broader visualization and data science community.

IEEE VIS is a leading international conference that advances research in visualization and visual analytics. Each year, the conference recognizes outstanding contributions by awarding the Best Paper Awards to the top 1% of submissions, selected through a rigorous nomination and review process by area paper chairs and a best paper committee.

Once again, we want to congratulate CSE students YU Yue and SHEN Leixian for such an accomplishment. We are looking forward to their future accomplishments and wishing them the best for their upcoming endeavors.