Lab Policies

If you are interested in conducting visualization or human-computer interaction (HCI) research under my supervision, this page will give an overview of the process. I advise both Ph.D. and MS students, as well as ambitious undergraduates who want to gain research experience and/or complete a Barrett Honor Thesis.

❗️ Note: Currently, I do not have funding available for MS/MCS students. ❗️

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What is visualization research?

If you want to learn about what visualization research (or a visualization dissertation) actually looks like, or if you want to understand what type of activities you would be doing as a researcher in the SVL, these two articles provide a really nice overview. Read these before going on!

• What is visualization research? What should it be? by Jessica Hullman
• So you want a (visualization) PhD? by Niklas Elmqvist

Interested in joining the lab?

Ph.D. Students

• If you are applying to ASU and are interested in joining the lab, please note so on your graduate application. You can also feel free to reach out via email after you have applied, that way I will be sure to see your application. In general, when you contact me, having an online presence will give you a significant competitive advantage. This includes: (1) a LinkedIn profile and (2) a personal website that contains relevant academic or research information like any published papers (with links to PDFs), a CV, contact information, a research statement, portfolio, etc. I recommend that you link to these in your application’s statement of purpose or CV, or in your email to me!
• If you contact me prior to applying, there is a chance that I won’t respond. Unfortunately, faculty receive many requests for assistantships from prospective students before they’ve applied, and it's easy to miss emails from earnest students. To help differentiate yourself from the crowd, you can include a brief personal statement describing some of the following:
  • Why do you want to do visualization or HCI research in the first place (i.e., what types of problems are you interested in or passionate about solving)?
  • Why do you think I would be a good fit as your advisor?
  • Do you have prior experience doing research or working in industry? What makes you think you be a successful Ph.D. student?
  • As noted above, linking to items like your LinkedIn profile and personal website are highly recommended!
• In your first semester, you are expected to take the Data Visualization graduate course (CSE 578) and do well in it. The course is designed to be research-focused, so it’s a good primer for future research and allows us to get to know each other better. If you do poorly in CSE 578 or we realize there is a bad student-advisor fit, it’s better for both of us if you switch to another lab.

MS Students

• If you are interested in doing an MS thesis, you must first take CSE 578. During the semester, come to my office hours and we’ll have an initial conversation. We’ll review your work at the end of the class and make a decision then on if I'm a good fit as an advisor. I usually do not have support for MS students, but am happy to advise students that are working on relevant topics.
• Like for Ph.D. students above, it is fine to reach out to me after you have applied to ASU (before arriving on campus). I recommend including some of the above-discussed items in your email (e.g., a personal statement motivating your desire to do a visualization thesis).

Undergraduate Students

• If you want to do visualization research for your Barrett Thesis, email me with a brief description of what you’d like to work on and we’ll set up a meeting. Be prepared to present a high-level outline of what type of work you’d like to do, what you think the main challenges will be, and a rough timeline describing how you think you can accomplish your goal.
• If you are just wanting to get research experience as an undergraduate, I am also happy to let you join a graduate student’s project if I have an opening. I usually cannot provide funding for undergraduates, though the FURI program at ASU (which you should certainly apply for!) provides a nice stipend for doing research if you want to propose a project.

General Lab Policies

Mentoring

I believe that, especially early on, clear communication is extremely important from the advisor to the Ph.D. student. New students in a research field almost always need guidance, especially about what constitutes good publishable research and how to plan and successfully execute research projects. A good analogy is bicycle training wheels; they prevent you from falling over while you’re learning to ride on your own. If you keep falling over, you’ll quickly get discouraged and not want to continue (and your productivity will plummet).

When starting out, you’ll be closely mentored either by myself or a senior student. As you gain experience and research proficiency, you’ll begin to take a leadership role in the lab, such as mentoring and helping younger students. Depending on your post-graduation goals (get an industry job, become a professor, work in a research lab, etc.), I will work to put you in a position to succeed, such as coordinating internships and networking with other academic institutions. When my students do well and succeed, it not only makes me happy, but it reflects positively on everyone in our lab. I want to make sure you succeed!

Research Projects

When starting a new project, we’ll discuss projected timelines, milestones, and other expectations. Progress depends on many factors, including your course load and the scope of the project. We’ll continually be reviewing what you’ve completed, what progress should look like going forward, and if the work so far is acceptable (i.e. if you’ve been slacking off).

I’m not a fan of what’s called “Least Publishable Unit,” which is producing work that is just enough to publish in a low-tier conference or journal. You should aim for high-quality work that can achieve good impact in a top venue such as the Vis and CHI conferences. Sprinting to hit a deadline usually results in subpar work that’s unlikely to get accepted. While it’s important that you work hard and hit most of your targets, it shouldn’t come at the expense of good research. If you cannot hit a target, we’ll discuss it over and probably decide to push to the next reasonable venue.

Lab Time

I generally prefer students work in the lab at least part-time during the week, since that facilitates a focused work environment, promotes lab unity, and allows for more interaction and discussion together. That said, if you are making sufficient progress on your work, I’m rather lax on when you show up and leave, and you don’t have to come in every day. In addition to 1-on-1 meetings to discuss your current projects and other academic obligations, you will attend weekly group lab meetings. We use that time to review the prior week, update each other’s projects and provide feedback, give practice talks, etc. We also have occasional outside activities like lab dinners. At ASU, we do not tolerate any form of discrimination, harassment, or otherwise hostile conduct. Such actions are a good way to get expelled not only from the lab, but ASU itself.

Paper Writing

The above description about mentoring also applies to writing research papers. Technical writing is difficult, and it can be doubly hard if English is not your primary language. Especially early on, you’ll start by producing a bulleted outline of all the critical points to make in the full paper. Once this outline is approved, you’ll create a rough draft well before the target venue’s submission deadline. The target timeline for a first draft is at least 1 month prior to the deadline. While this might seem like a large gap, you’ll be surprised at how long it takes to refine a rough draft into a polished and high-quality submission! We’ll go over your draft together and discuss edits for the second draft. You will probably have to make multiple iterations to improve the quality. At some point, your lab mates will likely read the paper and provide feedback. This is a helpful step, because the more eyes that see it, the more issues get noticed and the better the overall product is. Best case scenario, everything is ready to go in plenty of time; the days leading up to the deadline are for doing minor tweaks and revisions.

We write papers using LaTeX (unless there’s some necessary mitigating circumstance). Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with it; I wasn’t either until I began grad school! Overleaf is an online tool for LaTeX which makes it easy to share and collaborate on paper writing. For creating figures in papers (such as for user study results), we normally use libraries like R’s ggplot2.

Programming Practices and Software Stacks

While I have no hard and fast rules about programming languages and software stacks are required, normally we use popular libraries like D3.js, WebGL, and VTK for visualization, paired with layers like Flask, Node.js, SQL, React, etc. We use GitHub for version control. For projects that don’t require VR, high-end rendering, or specialized displays (such as tablet displays), web-based front-ends are generally easier, faster to develop, and more accessible compared to desktop applications, plus you can hook them into any programming paradigm you want (e.g., Python) via a backend server to do data analysis and management. If you’re new to full-stack dev work, that’s okay! You’ll pick it up as you go, though it certainly helps to have prior experience with it (especially front-end and/or interaction design).

Reading Papers

Especially early on, you will read A LOT of research papers to learn what all is out there in the Data Vis field: past work, current trends, and future directions. I highly recommend you have some sort of log, journal, diary, or other management system for organizing the papers you have read. Ideally, you want something that allows for relatively fast review when you might later need to cite a specific paper and how it applies to your current work. When I was a graduate student, I kept a huge Google Doc where I would paste screenshots from papers and jot down summary notes and relevant quotes. Currently, I use a free software called Zotero, which can export bibtex files for LaTex papers.