Designs to Support Better Visual Data Communication

Speaker: Dr. Cindy Xiong Bearfield
Georgia Institute of Technology

Title: Designs to Support Better Visual Data Communication

Date: Monday, 27 April 2026

Time: 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Venue: Lecture Theater F
(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater), near lift 25/26, HKUST

Abstract:

Well-chosen data visualizations can lead to powerful and intuitive processing by a viewer, both for visual analytics and data storytelling. When badly chosen, visualizations leave important patterns opaque or misunderstood. So how can we design an effective visualization? I will share several empirical studies demonstrating that visualization design can influence viewer perception and interpretation of data, referencing methods and insights from cognitive psychology. I leverage these study results to design natural language interfaces that recommend the most effective visualization to answer user queries and help them extract the ‘right’ message from data. I then identify two challenges in developing such an interface. First, human perception and interpretation of visualizations is riddled with biases, so we need to understand how people extract information from data. Second, natural language queries describing takeaways from visualizations can be ambiguous and thus difficult to interpret and model, so we need to investigate how people use natural language to describe a specific message. I will discuss ongoing and future efforts to address these challenges, providing concrete guidelines for visualization tools that help people more effectively explore and communicate data.

Biography:

Cindy Xiong Bearfield is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bridging the fields of psychology and data visualization, she aims to understand the cognitive and perceptual processes that underlie visual data interpretation and communication. Her research informs visualization design to elicit calibrated trust in complex data to facilitate more effective analysis and storytelling. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and her MS in Statistics from Northwestern University. Her research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award and a Google Research Scholar award. She has received paper awards at premier psychology and data visualization venues, including ACM CHI, IEEE PacificVis, and IEEE VIS.

Website: https://cyxiong.com/