Cognition and Visualization (CAV) Lab

About CAV Lab

We are the Cognition & Visualization Lab at Emory. We aim to facilitate effective data exploration and decision making by quantifying potential human or algorithmic biases and designing interfaces that will promote user reflection. Current and prospective students in the CAV Lab can check out the lab manual for information on lab culture and expectations.

If you are interested in working with our lab, please contact us.

Recent News

New coming student!

August 2022. Mengyu (Bonnie) Chen will join Emory as a Ph.D. student this Fall.

Ziwei Dong advances to Ph.D. Candidacy!

July 2022. Ziwei Dong successfully presented his work titled "PREFAIR: A Visual Analytic Approach to Model Fairness in ML Pre-Processing" for his qualifying exam and advances to candidacy.

Upcoming Paper @ EuroVIS 2022

June 2022. VIBE: A Design Space for VIsual Belief Elicitation in Data Journalism will be presented at EuroVIS 2022 by Shambhavi Mahajan, incoming Emory Ph.D. student Bonnie Chen, Alireza Karduni (Northwestern), and Yea-Seul Kim (U. Wisconsin).

Shrey Gupta advances to Ph.D. Candidacy!

May 2022. Shrey Gupta successfully presented his work titled "Boosting For Regression Transfer via Importance Sampling" for his qualifying exam and advances to candidacy.

Yanan Da advances to Ph.D. Candidacy!

April 2022. Yanan Da successfully presented her work titled "RUTABAGA: A Visual Analytic Approach for Bias Aware Graduate Admissions" for her qualifying exam and advances to candidacy.

3 Upcoming Papers @ VIS 2021

October 2021. Three papers to be presented at VIS 2021, including (1) a series of experiments on the effectiveness of interaction traces for mitigating bias (Left, Right, and Gender), (2) the expanded system from those experiments (Lumos), and (3) an interactive transformer-based literature review system (VitaLITy).

Recent Projects

Designing Bias Mitigation Interventions

In this work, we explore the ways in which the design of visualizations may be used to mitigate cognitive biases. We derive a design space comprised of 8 dimensions that can be manipulated to impact a user’s cognitive and analytic processes and describe them through an example hiring scenario. This design space can be used to guide and inform future vis systems that may integrate cognitive processes more closely. We subsequently implemented one intervention, interaction traces, in the Lumos system and conducted a series of experiments to test the effectiveness.

Transformer-Based Interactive Literature Review

We developed an interactive table-based visualization for searching academic literature using a transformer-based approach. The system, VitaLITy, has an initial set of 59k articles from popular visualization venues. The open-source code can be augmented to search literature from other academic sources as well. An alternative to keyword searches, find semantically similar documents by providing a set of initial seed papers or providing a working paper title and abstract to kickstart the literature review of a new project idea.