VIS Panels: Beyond the Last Mile: What Should Visualization Own in the Age of Data Systems and AI Agents?
This panel asks what role visualization should play when analytical work increasingly extends beyond the chart. While visualization research has traditionally excelled at representation, perception, and interaction, many of today's analytical bottlenecks occur upstream: interpreting data semantics, assessing trust and uncertainty, reasoning about provenance, validating transformations, and supervising automated analytical work. As database, AI, and systems communities invest heavily in these problems, the panel examines whether visualization research is under-recognized, under-positioned, or insufficiently engaged in shaping this emerging landscape. Bringing together researchers from visualization, databases, HCI, and commercial analytics, the discussion will debate whether VIS should reframe its contributions around analytical reasoning and knowledge construction, strengthen its connections to adjacent communities, or expand its scope to encompass the broader human-centered infrastructure of data analysis.
Presentations in this session
10:00 - 11:30
Beyond the Last Mile: What Should Visualization Own in the Age of Data Systems and AI Agents?
Vidya Setlur, Leilani Battle, Evan Peck, Eugene Wu