July 20-21, 2026
Tuesday’s attendees for VIS-SEA 2026, standing outside near the famous Davidson wildcat statue
We held our second annual VIS-SEA meeting at Davidson College, hosted by Katy Williams, Federico Iuricich, Cindy Xiong Bearfield, and Emily Wall. Building on the ideas we brainstormed during our inaugural gathering, this year’s meet-up featured a brand-new format: a dedicated, student-focused first day followed by a full-day unconference for all attendees.
Monday: Student-Centered Sessions & Career Insights
Monday kicked off in the Morcott Room of the Alvarez Student Union with a focus on student growth and career paths.
We started the afternoon with welcome introductions before diving into our Job & Career Panel. Attendees gained insights into navigating both industry and academic job markets from those with recent experience – thank you to Kevin Wang (Davidson, assistant professor), Shiyao Li (Emory University, PhD student with an industry job offer), and Dongyun Han (Clemson University, post-doc) for sharing your experiences. Following the panel presentation, we split into small breakout groups where students could ask targeted questions about application processes, interview tips, and career planning. Special shout-out to Shiyao for sharing his experience in a slide deck about landing a data science job through efforts outside of the job application.
Panel Highlights:
- Industry & Academia Perspectives: Speakers shared overviews covering job hunting in industry and academic pathways. We discussed the challenges of both types of job and how the panelists stay centered through setbacks.
- Targeted Q&A: Attendees broke into smaller groups to dive deeper into specific career trajectories.
After a coffee break, we gave the floor to our student presenters. Each student had 10 minutes to showcase an in-progress research project or idea, followed by 10-15 minutes of constructive feedback and discussion with the community. Adam Niemczura and Mahsa Partovi (both Clemson University) shared their different projects on point segmentation visualization, and Mengyu Chen presented her work on metacognitive notifications about interactions in a dashboard setting. We wrapped up the day by heading out to Hello, Sailor for dinner, where we enjoyed great food and informal conversations by Lake Norman.
After a delicious dinner at Hello, Sailor (minus a few folks, since it was late and we forgot to take a picture until we left).
Tuesday: The Unconference & Group Discussions
Tuesday brought the full group together in Chambers. We began with welcome remarks, introductions, and an interactive brainstorming session to organize topics and affinity groups for the afternoon’s unconference.
Attendees chatting at VIS-SEA 2026. Folks submitted discussion ideas on sticky notes, then clustered sticky notes by topic.
The finalized topics from the unconference sticky-note brainstorming.
Session #1 Breakdown
- Academia & Research Practice: Discussions centered around PhD advising, navigating pre/post-tenure milestones, and fostering effective research collaborations. One participant said, “It was a great opportunity to learn the whole route from PhD to tenure and throughout the different time periods in academia.”
- Existential Crises & Hot Takes: This topic came from sticky notes like “why do we do this?” and “LLMs killed the dashboard.” Attendees ended up being primarily PhD students and discussing the crises and questions of a student, like judging quantity vs. quality of papers and the differences in fields.
- AI, LLM, & ML: Discussion started with “does prompting count as an interaction in visualization?”, and then explored more technical aspects of prompting, prompt engineering, and refining LLM constraints for specific tasks.
Session #2 Breakdown
- Academic Writing & Clarity: Participants shared strategies for communicating complex research clearly through writing and oral presentations, specifically in the context of VIS papers.
- Industry & Coding Skills: Initially, participants talked about leet code questions, but in the current age of AI, discussion evolved into how AI shapes job prospects and how it’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t involve AI.
- Teaching & AI: Discussion was about exploring how generative AI models are reshaping how we teach visualization courses, including talking about if it’s still worthwhile to teach D3 and JavaScript, and to prioritize visualization design.
Throughout the day, attendees enjoyed meeting people from nearby universities, including a “family reunion” of those with ties to Chris North.
The Chris North academic family, containing his advisees, both past and present, and their advisees.
Looking Forward
We concluded the day back together to reflect on the event and discuss options for next year’s meet-up host and location. Federico has happily volunteered to host at Clemson University in 2027, but we would love your input in this Google Form on locations and content for future events.
A special thank you to the Clark Ross Academic Innovation Fund at Davidson College for supporting Monday’s dinner, Tuesday’s lunch, and snacks throughout the event!
If you have ideas for future iterations or would like to get involved in planning next year’s event, feel free to reach out to Katy Williams (kawilliams@davidson.edu).
Thank you to everyone who joined us and made this year’s meeting a success!