Post by Juergen Bernard

Celebrating a Milestone in Human-Centered Relation Discovery in Data! Relation discovery is everywhere, from understanding how sleep affects memory, to identifying which factors drive public health outcomes, to explaining decisions made by machine-learning models. As datasets grow in size and complexity, relation discovery has become an increasingly exploratory and demanding task for domain experts. For us in the Interactive Visual Data Analysis (IVDA) group, this challenge is a source of exciting research opportunities into human-centered data analytics.   This week, our PhD student Madhav Sachdeva successfully passed his PhD Proposal Defense at the Institute of Informatics at Universität Zürich, an important milestone in his ongoing doctoral journey.   Madhav’s dissertation project, “Towards Human-Centered Visual Analytics for Relation Discovery – Supporting Domain Experts through Interaction, Granularity and Workflow,” aims to advance how experts work with complex datasets when searching for meaningful relations. His research focuses on designing and developing innovative visual analytics solutions that help domain specialists: - interactively navigate complex relation data spaces, - balance effectiveness and efficiency in exploratory relation discovery, and - build transparent, human-centered analytical workflows beyond black-box approaches.   His applied work spans collaborations with experts in health, sustainability, digital libraries, digital humanities, and finance, demonstrating the broad relevance of his contributions.   This year, Madhav also earned two paper awards, at EuroVA/EuroVis and VMV, underscoring the impact of his research in the visual analytics community.   If you are interested in his work or potential collaborations, feel free to reach out. Thanks to all coauthors, project partners, and reviewers! Michael Blum, Jörn Kohlhammer, Jan Burmeister, Clara-Maria Barth, Jenny Schmid, ibrahim al hazwani, Lena Cibulski, Christopher Narayanan, Marvin Wiedenkeller, Jana Sedlakova, Jonas Blum, Yann Stricker, Rudolf Mumenthaler, Christina Haag, Reto Baumgartner, Phillip Ströbel, Tobias Schreck, and Remco Chang. #IVDA #VisualAnalytics #HumanAI #HCAI #HumanAICollab #ai #HumanCenteredAI #RelationDiscovery #DigitalHumanities #DigitalLibraries #HealthInformatics #UZH #DSI #wwf #oec #IfI #IEEEVIS #VMV2025 #BestPaper #ai