Talk Title: Building a Spatial and Embodied Workspace for Data-Driven Workflows:
Immersive Visualizations and more

Speaker: Yalong Yang, Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech.

Location: HBK 2105 and Zoom

Abstract: Data analysis has become a critical component of many modern professional workflows. Data-driven workflows are inherently complex, characterized by their iterative, interactive, and often prolonged nature. Analysts rely heavily on digital input and output systems to externalize information and augment human cognitive capacity. These systems serve as crucial intermediaries between raw data and meaningful insights, facilitating the exploration, manipulation, and interpretation of large datasets. The evolution of digital tools for data analysis has seen significant advancements in user interface design, from early command-line interfaces to sophisticated graphical environments, continuously adapting to better align with users’ mental models and improve overall efficiency.

Immersive technologies are rapidly evolving toward becoming a mainstream computing environment, presenting significant potential for revolutionizing data analysis practices. Virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) systems, capable of projecting interactive screens onto any surface or immersive graphics into any space around the user, offer unprecedented possibilities for data analysis. With VR/AR, users can spatially arrange numerous data-related artifacts and intuitively interact with data through body movements. In this talk, Yalong will introduce some of his work in exploring how to take advantage of those features to build novel and effective interactive systems in VR/AR.

Bio:  Yalong Yang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Before joining Georgia Tech, he spent two wonderful years at Virginia Tech as a faculty member. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Visual Computing Group at Harvard University and received his Ph.D. from Human-Centred Computing Department, Monash University, Australia.
His research focuses on VR/AR/MR/XR (spatial computing), Visualization (VIS), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). He regularly publishes in premier venues such as ACM CHI, ACM UIST, IEEE TVCG, IEEE VR, IEEE VIS, ISMAR, and EuroVis, with his work earning three Best Paper Honorable Mention Awards (IEEE VIS 2016 & 2022; ACM CHI 2021). He is an NSF CAREER Award recipient and was selected as a Google Research Scholar in 2025. He also actively serves the research communities by serving on organization and program committees for ACM CHI, IEEE VR, IEEE VIS, and ISMAR. More information is available at https://ivi.cc.gatech.edu/pi.html.