Prof. Huamin QU, Director of IPO, and his team of PhD students and a PhD graduate received Honourable Mention Award at ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2022 (CHI 2022) held on April 30 to May 5 at New Orleans, LA, USA, with the paper "Structure-aware Visualization Retrieval".

CHI is a premier international conference for the field of Human-Computer Interaction, annually brings together researchers and practitioners from all over the world and from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and positionalities, who have as an overarching goal to make the world a better place with interactive digital technologies.

The award-winning team consists of PhD candidates Haotian LI, Aoyu WU and Huan WEI, and PhD graduate Yong WANG from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). They are all current or past members of HKUST VisLab, a multidisciplinary group led by Prof. QU aiming at improving the visual analysis and various visualizations like data visualization, human-computer interaction and explainable artificial intelligence etc.

In their paper “Structure-aware Visualization Retrieval”, the team presented a structure-aware method to improve the performance of similar data visualization retrieval by focusing on not only the visual information, but also the structural information which are normally ignored. Such method provides a complete and different perspective of characterizing visualizations using the spatial and hierarchical relationship of visual elements.

They demonstrated the effectiveness of their approach and advantages over the existing methods through quantitative comparisons, user study and case studies. With the wide usage of data visualizations, the research findings can benefit various downstream applications such as visualization recommendation.

For more details, please refer to the event website, their presentation and paper.