Cieran: Designing Sequential Colormaps via In-Situ Active Preference Learning

Quality colormaps can help communicate important data patterns. However, finding an aesthetically pleasing colormap that looks "just right" for a given scenario requires significant design and technical expertise. We introduce Cieran, a tool that allows any data analyst to rapidly find quality colormaps while designing charts within Jupyter Notebooks. Our system employs an active preference learning paradigm to rank expert-designed colormaps and create new ones from pairwise comparisons, allowing analysts who are novices in color design to tailor colormaps to their data context. We accomplish this by treating colormap design as a path planning problem through the CIELAB colorspace with a context-specific reward model. In an evaluation with twelve scientists, we found that Cieran effectively modeled user preferences to rank colormaps and leveraged this model to create new quality designs. Our work shows the potential of active preference learning for supporting efficient visualization design optimization.

Conversational AI Threads for Visualizing Multidimensional Datasets

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential in data analysis, yet their full capabilities remain uncharted. Our work explores the capabilities of LLMs for creating and refining visualizations via conversational interfaces. We used an LLM to conduct a re-analysis of a prior Wizard-of-Oz study examining the use of chatbots for conducting visual analysis. We surfaced the strengths and weaknesses of LLM-driven analytic chatbots, finding that they fell short in supporting progressive visualization refinements. From these findings, we developed AI Threads, a multi-threaded analytic chatbot that enables analysts to proactively manage conversational context and improve the efficacy of its outputs. We evaluate its usability through a crowdsourced study (n=40) and in-depth interviews with expert analysts (n=10). We further demonstrate the capabilities of AI Threads on a dataset outside the LLM's training corpus. Our findings show the potential of LLMs while also surfacing challenges and fruitful avenues for future research.

Scholastic: Graphical Human-Al Collaboration for Inductive and Interpretive Text Analysis

Interpretive scholars generate knowledge from text corpora by manually sampling documents, applying codes, and refining and collating codes into categories until meaningful themes emerge. Given a large corpus, machine learning could help scale this data sampling and analysis, but prior research shows that experts are generally concerned about algorithms potentially disrupting or driving interpretive scholarship. We take a human-centered design approach to addressing concerns around machine-assisted interpretive research to build Scholastic, which incorporates a machine-in-the-loop clustering algorithm to scaffold interpretive text analysis. As a scholar applies codes to documents and refines them, the resulting coding schema serves as structured metadata which constrains hierarchical document and word clusters inferred from the corpus. Interactive visualizations of these clusters can help scholars strategically sample documents further toward insights. Scholastic demonstrates how human-centered algorithm design and visualizations employing familiar metaphors can support inductive and interpretive research methodologies through interactive topic modeling and document clustering.