VisRocks 2025 Call for Participation
This year, an unprecedented collaboration between VisRocks and the West Coast Party brings to VIS attendees:
West Coast Amplified: VisRocks Party at VIS 25
Tue Nov 4 2025, 9pm-midnight, Replugged Vienna
VisRocks brings live playing with VIS researchers' bands and VIS-oriented lyrics.
The West Coast crew brings the drinks!
Replugged Vienna, Lerchenfelder Str. 23, 1070 Wien
It’s a ten minute walk from the Museum of Natural History where the reception takes place Go north on the 6-lane large Museumsplatz and take a left on Lerchenfelder Str. right after the athletic fields. Walk for 250m (0.155343 miles) and it’s on your left. If you skipped the reception and are coming from the Austria Center, the best option seems to be U1 to Praterstern and then U2 to Volkstheater.
VisRocks
Why?
Many VIS researchers are playing music. Since the parties at VIS are fun and attract many participants to the conferences and their friends, let's add another style of party where VIS researchers will entertain their colleagues and add to the fun. We expect that VisRocks will allow all generations to get together and facilitate connections in a relaxed atmosphere.
Practical Information
Kids are welcome, we have ear protection for them, and for everyone.
There are several rooms, with different degrees of noise, so that everyone is comfortable and there are opportunities to both dance and chat.
If you'd like to contribute (e.g, sing, play, dance), don´t hesitate to contact us!
VisRocks Chairs
Jean-Daniel Fekete (Inria, Université Paris-Saclay)
Michael Sedlmair (University of Stuttgart)
Tobias Rau (University of Stuttgart)
Markus Bögl (TU Wien)
West Coast Party
The West Coast party returns, co-hosted by Tableau, UBC Vancouver, UBC Okanagan, University of Washington, University of Victoria, and Berkeley. This year we're joining forces with VisRocks, the open stage for playing music!
What's New!
- Tableau Research is proud to be a bronze sponsor at this year’s VIS conference! The team is presenting two workshop papers at HFIA, and a TVCG paper, From Dashboard Zoo to Census: A Case Study with Tableau Public. Arjun Srinivasan and Vidya Setlur will be attending in Vienna; be sure to stop by, say hello, and learn more about our group’s work. We’re also hiring interns for the summer!
- Tamara's InfoVis Group at UBC Vancouver will have three PhD candidates at VIS this year. Mara Solen will present her VIS25 paper A Design Space for Multiscale Visualization and her VisComm Workshop paper Visualization Literacy or Skillset? Beyond the Analogy to Textual Literacy. Matt Oddo will present his TVCG paper The Census-Stub Graph Invariant Descriptor. Ryan Smith will present his Input Visualization Workshop paper Potential Areas of Bias in Visualization-as-Input Systems. Tamara will present the TVCG paperIceberg Sensemaking: A Process Model for Critical Data Analysis, a tutorial on Visualization Analysis and Design, and participate in the panel on VIS Reviewing. She is co-editor of the AK Peters Visualization book series with CRC/Routledge, which will have a physical table at VIS. Since our last party in 2023, alums Ana Crisan and Matt Brehmer have joined Waterloo as assistant professors. Also, UBC CS will be hiring faculty in an open/prioritized search, where visualization is one of the priority areas.
- Pourang's group at the Okanagan Visualization and Interaction Lab, is building new research capacity since his move to UBC Okanagan, including the purchase of high powered computing systems for Vis+AI. Stay tuned for upcoming publications.
- Jeff and Leilani (now tenured!) continue to co-lead the Interactive Data Lab at UW. We’re excited to celebrate a 10 Year Test-of-Time Award for Voyager (led by Kanit Wongsuphasawat and Dominik Moritz during their UW PhD days), as well as an Honorable Mention short paper by BS/MS student Ron Pechuk. Melissa Lin (undergraduate student at CMU) and Heer Patel (masters student at UW) will co-present a short paper on how Observable users decompose D3 code, a project they completed through the DUB Summer REU program for HCI research. Post-doc Hyeok Kim (on the faculty job market!) will present data augmentation methods to automatically improve visualization knowledge bases, while Jeff will present work on scaling interactive visualizations by up to multiple orders-of-magnitude. Meanwhile, Jeff co-founded a new start-up company Ridge AI—come talk to him about it! As always, we welcome faculty and graduate student applications to UW.
- Charles and Miguel represent the Victoria Interactive eXperiences with Information (VIXI) lab at UVic. At this year’s conference, Wei Wei will participate in the Doctoral Colloquium and present his alt.vis paper The Fuzzy Front Ends. Bahare Bakhtiari will present her short paper FlexPhys, her posters “Physically Encoding Data with Material Flexibility” and VISMOCK (highlight of her DIS’25 paper), and her Input Visualization Workshop paper Repeated Actions in Fabric Manipulation Crafts. Matthew Termuende will present his paperThe Impact of Visual Segmentation on Lexical Word Recognition. Ruishan Wu (co-supervised with Sheelagh Carpendale at SFU), will present her EduVis workshop paper on Exploring Data Detective Practices and her poster “WaveThread”. Charles is also a collaborator on Leon Li (Queensland U PhD candidate with Max Cordeil)’s VIS25 paper Running with Data and his poster Embedded and Situated Visualisation in Mixed Reality to Support Interval Running (highlight of his EuroVis’25 paper).
- Marti's group at UC Berkeley is represented at Vis this year by Chase Stoke’s research on Text Functions in Visualization and Visualization Affordances.
Find Us!
Find a host from the Tableau, UBC, UW, UVic, or Berkeley research groups, to see if we still have drink tickets left. Otherwise, there will be a cash bar. It’s fine to bring other people along.
We hope to see you there!
Vidya Setlur (Tableau)
Tamara Munzner (UBC Vancouver)
Pourang Irani (UBC Okanagan)
Jeffrey Heer (UW)
Leilani Battle (UW)
Charles Perin (UVic)
Miguel Nacenta (UVic)
Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley)
