By Katy Williams

July 20-22, 2025

We held our first VIS-SEA meeting on July 20-22 at Emory University, hosted by Emily Wall. Emily, Katy Williams, Lane Harrison, and Cindy Xiong Bearfield organized the gathering, which had over 20 attendees participate at various events.

Attendees of the first VIS-SEA meeting. There are about 20 people standing in front of a screen with the VIS-SEA logo behind them. They are wearing name tags and VIS-SEA stickers. Attendees of the first VIS-SEA meeting.

The organizers: Cindy Xiong Bearfield, Emily Wall, Katy Williams, Lane Harrison. The organizers: Cindy Xiong Bearfield, Emily Wall, Katy Williams, Lane Harrison.

Sunday, July 20 we gathered for dinner at The General Muir. The eight guests were able to meet each other and hear where everyone was coming from, ranging from a (now tenured) professor at Clemson to an undergraduate student at Emory.

Monday, July 21 was the meat of the meeting. We started the day with an introductions game, followed by splitting into teams to research possibile options for our afternoon activity in the Atlanta area. Suprisingly, the Atlanta-heavy crowd opted for the CDC Museum – a change-up for the locals, who had already seen the Coca-Cola Museum and the Georgia Aquarium.

After a coffee break, each person brainstormed ideas for our Unconference. An unconference is where the attendees determine the session topics at the beginning of the meeting – rather than the organizers prescribing the topics for each session. Lots of ideas came up, ranging from finding research topics to presenting to collaboration.

The sticky notes of initial topics, submitted by attendees. The sticky notes of initial topics, submitted by attendees.

Emily and Cindy organizing the ideas on sticky notes Emily Wall and Cindy Xiong Bearfield organizing the ideas by rearranging sticky notes.

The finalized clustering of topics The finalized topics: LLMs and Evaluation, PhD Research, Lab Culture, Design, Collaboration Outside of Our Community, Collaboration Inside of Our Community, Money ($$/Grants), VIS-XP, Career Talk, Future Research Directions, Teaching, Presentation.

Following lunch, we reconvened into our three parallel sessions for the afternoon:

  1. PhD Research
  2. Career Talks
  3. Presentation

The conversations continued until our afternoon break, when we all shared rides over to the CDC Museum.

After an extensive car search (the museum is a government building and is part of the greater CDC complex), we all wandered around the exhibits and enjoyed learning how disease and social factors shaped history. We ended the day with dinner at Srithai: Thai Kitchen and Sushi Bar.

The following day, some folks had to leave so we had a lively, intimate discussion about teaching. We discussed developing and teaching MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), remote summer classes, and dynamics in the classroom.

Proposed topics for the second session of the unconference. Optional topics for the second day of the unconference: LLMs + Eval + Future Research Directions, Lab Culture and Collaboration, Design and VIS+X (VIS and VR, VIS and the humanities, etc.).

We closed with some ideas for future iterations of this meet-up:

If you have additional ideas, please send them to Katy Williams (kawilliams@davidson.edu).

Thank you all for attending!