arXiv subjects

Matthew Brehmer

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew Brehmer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

InsightToast: Proactive Information Retrieval & Glanceable Visualization in the Side Channel of Data-Rich Meetings

Missing institutional context during meetings can impede effective participation. Retrieving relevant information, often scattered across heterogeneous internal and external sources, requires costly task-switching that disrupts both individual focus and collective conversational flow, particularly detrimental during cognitively demanding tasks such as decision-making. We introduce InsightToast, a mixed-initiative application that monitors verbal discourse in real time, identifies topics and informational needs as they emerge, and proactively retrieves relevant information through a multi-agent large language model (LLM)-based pipeline integrating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to produce source-grounded insights as succinct text and glanceable interactive charts, delivered through a peripheral interface as ephemeral toasts in the conversation's side channel. To demonstrate the potential for yielding serendipitous insights, we showcase a usage scenario involving a knowledge base of legislative documents as the meeting's context. We then report on a comparative study (N=16), in which participants arrived at informed policy decisions while maintaining natural conversation flow.

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arXiv2026

Vibes on Demand: Adding Vibrotactile Encoding to Line Charts Shows Experiential Benefits Without Performance Costs

Details on demand is a common design pattern in visualization design, especially useful when interacting with visually-saturated or small displays. Beyond visualization, another common approach for saturated displays is to incorporate other modalities, such as haptic feedback. While haptic rendering in visualization has primarily targeted accessibility needs, with haptics as a substitute for visual feedback, studies using haptics outside of a visualization context have shown value in experiential factors, such as increased confidence in ambiguous contexts and higher engagement. We explore vibrotactile feedback as a reinforcing information channel for communicating trends in details-on-demand tooltips on touchscreens. We identify preferred parameter configurations for our haptic encoding, informed by a study where participants identified parameter configurations that they perceived to most accurately reflect the dynamics of line charts appearing in tooltips. In a second study, we evaluated participant performance in a pairwise comparison task, finding that incorporating vibrotactile encoding improves involvement without affecting accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings for future visualization design, and propose directions for applications and future studies.

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arXiv2026

The Choreography of Augmented Reality Timelines: Studying the Relative Position, Chronology, & Situatedness of Event Sequences

Timelines are effective ways to tell historical and personal stories. However, most timeline visualization tools impose an inflexible model of time prioritizing chronological clarity. On the other hand, unconstrained representations can better capture the irregular and contextual nature of lived time, but often at the cost of interpretability. In this work, we explore this continuum with a study of how historical and personal timelines could manifest in physical spaces. We conducted a formative study (N=12) in which participants freely arranged events within a physical environment. We observed a diversity of strategies reflecting the personal and context-dependent nature of temporal mental models. We also invited participants to consider how others could move through their timelines. Our analysis led to a choreographic approach to timeline creation, as well as a proof-of-concept tablet-based augmented reality (AR) application that supports spatial timeline drawing and viewing. Finally, we reflect on the design implications of encoding chronology, pacing, and spatial context in immersive timeline stories.

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arXiv2026

Challenges in Synchronous & Remote Collaboration Around Visualization

We characterize 16 challenges faced by those investigating and developing remote and synchronous collaborative experiences around visualization. Our work reflects the perspectives and prior research efforts of an international group of 29 experts from across human-computer interaction and visualization sub-communities. The challenges are anchored around five collaborative activities that exhibit a centrality of visualization and multimodal communication. These activities include exploratory data analysis, creative ideation, visualization-rich presentations, joint decision making grounded in data, and real-time data monitoring. The challenges also reflect the changing dynamics of these activities in the face of recent advances in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). As an organizing scheme for future research at the intersection of visualization and computer-supported cooperative work, we align the challenges with a sequence of four sets of research and development activities: technological choices, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation.

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arXiv2026

Glass Chirolytics: Reciprocal Compositing and Shared Gestural Control for Face-to-Face Collaborative Visualization at a Distance

Videoconference conversations about data often entail screen sharing visualization artifacts, in which nonverbal communication goes largely ignored. Beyond presentation use cases, conversations supported by visualization also arise in collaborative decision making, technical interviews, and tutoring: use cases that benefit from participants being able to see one another as they exchange questions about the data. In this paper, we employ a reciprocal compositing of visualization and interface widgets over the mirrored video of one's conversation partner, suggestive of a pane of glass, in which both parties can simultaneously manipulate composited elements via bimanual gestures. We demonstrate our approach with implementations of several visualization interfaces spanning the aforementioned use cases, and we evaluate our approach in a study (N = 16) comparing it to videoconferencing while using a mouse to interact with a collaborative web application. Our findings suggest that our approach promotes feelings of presence and mutual awareness of analytical intent.

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arXiv2025

Evaluating an Immersive Analytics Application at an Enterprise Business Intelligence Customer Conference

We reflect on an evaluation of an immersive analytics application (Tableau for visionOS) conducted at a large enterprise business intelligence (BI) conference. Conducting a study in such a context offered an opportunistic setting to gather diverse feedback. However, this setting also highlighted the challenge of evaluating usability while also assessing potential utility, as feedback straddled between the novelty of the experience and the practicality of the application in participants' analytical workflows. This formative evaluation with 22 participants allowed us to gather insights with respect to the usability of Tableau for visionOS, along with broader perspectives on the potential for head-mounted displays (HMDs) to promote new ways to engage with BI data. Our experience suggests a need for new evaluation considerations that integrate qualitative and quantitative measures and account for unique interaction patterns with 3D representations and interfaces accessible via an HMD. Overall, we contribute an enterprise perspective on evaluation methodologies for immersive analytics.

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arXiv2025

AInsight: Augmenting Expert Decision-Making with On-the-Fly Insights Grounded in Historical Data

In decision-making conversations, experts must navigate complex choices and make on-the-spot decisions while engaged in conversation. Although extensive historical data often exists, the real-time nature of these scenarios makes it infeasible for decision-makers to review and leverage relevant information. This raises an interesting question: What if experts could utilize relevant past data in real-time decision-making through insights derived from past data? To explore this, we implemented a conversational user interface, taking doctor-patient interactions as an example use case. Our system continuously listens to the conversation, identifies patient problems and doctor-suggested solutions, and retrieves related data from an embedded dataset, generating concise insights using a pipeline built around a retrieval-based Large Language Model (LLM) agent. We evaluated the prototype by embedding Health Canada datasets into a vector database and conducting simulated studies using sample doctor-patient dialogues, showing effectiveness but also challenges, setting directions for the next steps of our work.

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arXiv2025

The 2nd MERCADO Workshop at IEEE VIS 2025: Multimodal Experiences for Remote Communication Around Data Online

We propose a half-day workshop at IEEE VIS 2025 on addressing the emerging challenges in data-rich multimodal remote collaboration. We focus on synchronous, remote, and hybrid settings where people take part in tasks such as data analysis, decision-making, and presentation. With this workshop, we continue successful prior work from the first MERCADO workshop at VIS 2023 and a 2024 Shonan Seminar that followed. Based on the findings of the earlier events, we invite research and ideas related to four themes of challenges: Tools & Technologies, Individual Differences & Interpersonal Dynamics, AI-assisted Collaboration, and Evaluation. With this workshop, we aim to broaden the community, foster new collaborations, and develop a research agenda to address these challenges in future research. Our planned workshop format is comprised of a keynote, short presentations, a breakout group session, and discussions organized around the identified challenges.

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arXiv2025

Video-Conferencing Beyond Screen-Sharing and Thumbnail Webcam Videos: Gesture-Aware Augmented Reality Video for Data-Rich Remote Presentations

Synchronous data-rich conversations are commonplace within enterprise organizations, taking place at varying degrees of formality between stakeholders at different levels of data literacy. In these conversations, representations of data are used to analyze past decisions, inform future course of action, as well as persuade customers, investors, and executives. However, it is difficult to conduct these conversations between remote stakeholders due to poor support for presenting data when video-conferencing, resulting in disappointing audience experiences. In this position statement, I reflect on our recent work incorporating multimodal interaction and augmented reality video, suggesting that video-conferencing does not need to be limited to screen-sharing and relegating a speaker's video to a separate thumbnail view. I also comment on future research directions and collaboration opportunities.

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arXiv2024

The Data-Wink Ratio: Emoji Encoder for Generating Semantically-Resonant Unit Charts

Communicating data insights in an accessible and engaging manner to a broader audience remains a significant challenge. To address this problem, we introduce the Emoji Encoder, a tool that generates a set of emoji recommendations for the field and category names appearing in a tabular dataset. The selected set of emoji encodings can be used to generate configurable unit charts that combine plain text and emojis as word-scale graphics. These charts can serve to contrast values across multiple quantitative fields for each row in the data or to communicate trends over time. Any resulting chart is simply a block of text characters, meaning that it can be directly copied into a text message or posted on a communication platform such as Slack or Teams. This work represents a step toward our larger goal of developing novel, fun, and succinct data storytelling experiences that engage those who do not identify as data analysts. Emoji-based unit charts can offer contextual cues related to the data at the center of a conversation on platforms where emoji-rich communication is typical.

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arXiv2024

Bringing Data into the Conversation: Adapting Content from Business Intelligence Dashboards for Threaded Collaboration Platforms

To enable data-driven decision-making across organizations, data professionals need to share insights with their colleagues in context-appropriate communication channels. Many of their colleagues rely on data but are not themselves analysts; furthermore, their colleagues are reluctant or unable to use dedicated analytical applications or dashboards, and they expect communication to take place within threaded collaboration platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. In this paper, we introduce a set of six strategies for adapting content from business intelligence (BI) dashboards into appropriate formats for sharing on collaboration platforms, formats that we refer to as dashboard snapshots. Informed by prior studies of enterprise communication around data, these strategies go beyond redesigning or restyling by considering varying levels of data literacy across an organization, introducing affordances for self-service question-answering, and anticipating the post-sharing lifecycle of data artifacts. These strategies involve the use of templates that are matched to common communicative intents, serving to reduce the workload of data professionals. We contribute a formal representation of these strategies and demonstrate their applicability in a comprehensive enterprise communication scenario featuring multiple stakeholders that unfolds over the span of months.

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arXiv2024

VisConductor: Affect-Varying Widgets for Animated Data Storytelling in Gesture-Aware Augmented Video Presentation

Augmented video presentation tools provide a natural way for presenters to interact with their content, resulting in engaging experiences for remote audiences, such as when a presenter uses hand gestures to manipulate and direct attention to visual aids overlaid on their webcam feed. However, authoring and customizing these presentations can be challenging, particularly when presenting dynamic data visualization (i.e., animated charts). To this end, we introduce VisConductor, an authoring and presentation tool that equips presenters with the ability to configure gestures that control affect-varying visualization animation, foreshadow visualization transitions, direct attention to notable data points, and animate the disclosure of annotations. These gestures are integrated into configurable widgets, allowing presenters to trigger content transformations by executing gestures within widget boundaries, with feedback visible only to them. Altogether, our palette of widgets provides a level of flexibility appropriate for improvisational presentations and ad-hoc content transformations, such as when responding to audience engagement. To evaluate VisConductor, we conducted two studies focusing on presenters (N = 11) and audience members (N = 11). Our findings indicate that our approach taken with VisConductor can facilitate interactive and engaging remote presentations with dynamic visual aids. Reflecting on our findings, we also offer insights to inform the future of augmented video presentation tools.

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arXiv2024

RemixTape: Enriching Narratives about Metrics with Semantic Alignment and Contextual Recommendation

The temporal dynamics of quantitative metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) are central to conversations in enterprise organizations. Recently, major business intelligence providers have introduced new infrastructure for defining, sharing, and monitoring metric values. However, these values are often presented in isolation and appropriate context is seldom externalized. In this design study, we present REMIXTAPE, an application for constructing structured narratives around metrics. With design imperatives grounded in prior work and a formative interview study, REMIXTAPE provides a hierarchical canvas for collecting and coordinating sequences of line chart representations of metrics, along with the ability to externalize situational context around them. REMIXTAPE includes affordances to semantically align and annotate juxtaposed charts and text, as well as recommendations of complementary charts based on metrics already present on the canvas. We evaluated REMIXTAPE in a study in which six enterprise data professionals reproduced and extended partial narratives. They appreciated REMIXTAPE as a novel alternative to dashboards, galleries, and slide presentations for supporting conversations about metrics. We conclude with a reflection on our design choices and process, with a call to define a conceptual foundation for remixing in the context of visualization.

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arXiv2023

Fostering Enterprise Conversations Around Data on Collaboration Platforms

In enterprise organizations, data-driven decision making processes include the use of business intelligence dashboards and collaborative deliberation on communication platforms such as Slack. However, apart from those in data analyst roles, there is shallow engagement with dashboard content due to insufficient context, poor representation choices, or a lack of access and guidance. Data analysts often need to retarget their dashboard content for those with limited engagement, and this retargeting process often involves switching between different tools. To inform the design of systems that streamline this work process, we conducted a co-design study with nine enterprise professionals who use dashboard content to communicate with their colleagues. We consolidate our findings from the co-design study into a comprehensive demonstration scenario. Using this scenario as a design probe, we interviewed 14 data workers to further develop our design recommendations.

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arXiv2023

Visualizing the Weird and the Eerie

In this brief essay, I reflect on how Mark Fisher's definitions of the weird and the eerie could be applied in communicative data visualization. I ask how visualization designers might elicit these two impressions when a viewer is engaging with multimodal representations of data. I argue that there are situations in which viewers should feel uncertain or suspicious of unseen forces that account for the presence or absence of audiovisual patterns. Finally, I conclude that the ability to appreciate the weird and the eerie in data is particularly important at this moment in history, one marked by significant ecological and economic disruption.

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arXiv2023

The MERCADO Workshop at IEEE VIS 2023: Multimodal Experiences for Remote Communication Around Data Online

We propose a half-day workshop at IEEE VIS 2023 on the topic of communication and collaboration around data. Specifically, we aim to gather researchers interested on multimodal, synchronous, and remote or hybrid forms of communication and collaboration within organizational and educational settings. This topic lies at the intersection of data visualization, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported collaborative work, and overlaps thematically with several prior seminars and workshops. Our intended outcomes for the workshop include assembling a corpus of inspiring examples and a design space, ideally consolidated into a survey paper, as well as the establishment of new collaborations and a shared research agenda. We anticipate a format comprised of short presentations and demos, an invited keynote or fireside chat, and a breakout group session organized around specific application domains. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/mercadoworkshop.

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arXiv2022

Augmented Chironomia for Presenting Data to Remote Audiences

To facilitate engaging and nuanced conversations around data, we contribute a touchless approach to interacting directly with visualization in remote presentations. We combine dynamic charts overlaid on a presenter's webcam feed with continuous bimanual hand tracking, demonstrating interactions that highlight and manipulate chart elements appearing in the foreground. These interactions are simultaneously functional and deictic, and some allow for the addition of "rhetorical flourish", or expressive movement used when speaking about quantities, categories, and time intervals. We evaluated our approach in two studies with professionals who routinely deliver and attend presentations about data. The first study considered the presenter perspective, where 12 participants delivered presentations to a remote audience using a presentation environment incorporating our approach. The second study considered the audience experience of 17 participants who attended presentations supported by our environment. Finally, we reflect on observations from these studies and discuss related implications for engaging remote audiences in conversations about data.

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arXiv2021

Generative Design Inspiration for Glyphs with Diatoms

We introduce Diatoms, a technique that generates design inspiration for glyphs by sampling from palettes of mark shapes, encoding channels, and glyph scaffold shapes. Diatoms allows for a degree of randomness while respecting constraints imposed by columns in a data table: their data types and domains as well as semantic associations between columns as specified by the designer. We pair this generative design process with two forms of interactive design externalization that enable comparison and critique of the design alternatives. First, we incorporate a familiar small multiples configuration in which every data point is drawn according to a single glyph design, coupled with the ability to page between alternative glyph designs. Second, we propose a small permutables design gallery, in which a single data point is drawn according to each alternative glyph design, coupled with the ability to page between data points. We demonstrate an implementation of our technique as an extension to Tableau featuring three example palettes, and to better understand how Diatoms could fit into existing design workflows, we conducted interviews and chauffeured demos with 12 designers. Finally, we reflect on our process and the designers' reactions, discussing the potential of our technique in the context of visualization authoring systems. Ultimately, our approach to glyph design and comparison can kickstart and inspire visualization design, allowing for the serendipitous discovery of shape and channel combinations that would have otherwise been overlooked.

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