2025: A standout year for the giCentre!

2025 has been an exceptionally strong year for the giCentre — quite possibly one of our best yet.

We were delighted to welcome three new colleagues to the team: Narges, Ali, and Alexis, whose expertise and energy have already made a real impact.

This year also marked the official launch of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Diversity in Data Visualisation (CDT). The first cohort of students has arrived, and the programme is now fully up and running. This has been made possible by the outstanding work of Jason and Jo, who have led the CDT from vision to reality. You can read more about it here: https://diverse-cdt.ac.uk/

On the research front, we published more than 25 papers, celebrated the graduation of two students, and secured three new grants — achievements that reflect the strength and breadth of our work.

We also had a strong presence at IEEE VIS 2025, showcasing our research and engaging with the wider visualisation community.

All in all, 2025 has been an outstanding year for the giCentre, and we’re excited about what lies ahead.

Fully-funded PhD: "predicting and mapping damp and mould in English housing to estimate impacts on hospital admissions for pneumonia and severe asthma"

We have a fully-funded* PhD position on "predicting and mapping damp and mould in English housing to estimate impacts on hospital admissions for pneumonia and severe asthma" with a supervision team from both City St Georges and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine .

See here for more details. This position would suit someone with knowledge and interests in GIS, data science, public health and statistical modelling.

You will need to write a proposal but contact Aidan Slingsby, Sierra Clark and/or Patrick Bidulka to chat about this. The application deadline is 14th January.

*Includes a tax-free stipend of around £22K per year, but only UK fees are funded so oversees applicants would need to find funding for the fee difference.

giCentre shines at IEEE VIS 2025 in Vienna

The giCentre wrapped up a successful week at IEEE VIS 2025 in Vienna, with a strong and inspiring presence across papers, posters, and presentations. Our team came back energised by a week of exciting research, discussions, and community connections.

Congratulations to Amir, whose paper “What do LLMs prioritize when adapting visualizations to user personas?” received Best Paper honours at the Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare!

We were also thrilled to see several giCentre researchers share their latest work:

• Maeve presented “Capturing Visualization Design Rationale.”

• Natalia presented “Human in the Loop: Visual Analytics for Building Models Recognizing Behavioral Patterns in Time Series.”

• Narges presented “CLAIMATE: AI-enabled Climate Change Communication through Personalized and Localized Narrative Visualization.”

Jason and Jo co-authored two additional papers:

• “Reframing Pattern: A Comprehensive Approach to a Composite Visual Variable.”

• “Constraint-Based Break Points for Responsive Visualization Design and Development.”

We also showcased two posters led by Radu and Dany, rounding out a week full of ideas and inspiration.

Beyond the sessions, the team enjoyed the conference reception at Vienna’s stunning Natural History Museum, and had plenty of fun connecting with the VIS community at parties and the VIS Rock concert.

We’re proud of everyone’s contributions and can’t wait to build on this momentum for next year.

CDT Launch

The Centre for Doctoral Training in Diversity in Data Visualisation (Diverse CDT) has welcomed its first cohort of 11 students, marking a major step in advancing diversity and innovation in data-driven research.

Bringing a wide mix of disciplinary and social backgrounds, the cohort will work collaboratively to explore how diverse perspectives can shape more inclusive data practices and visualisation approaches.

Diverse CDT is the first Centre for Doctoral Training led by City St George’s, delivered in partnership with the University of Warwick and with significant involvement from the giCentre. The programme moves beyond traditional one-to-one supervision, prioritising cohort-based learning, collaborative research, and engagement with community stakeholders.

Learn more about the programme and its mission on the Diverse CDT website.

Welcome to Our New giCentre Colleagues

We are pleased to welcome three new researchers to the giCentre, further strengthening our expertise in data visualisation and human-centred analytics.

Narges Mahyar
Narges’s work spans visualisation, HCI, social computing, and design, focused on enhancing people's ability to tackle complex problems. She develops and evaluates innovative systems that support better decision-making for experts and the public, with recent research centred on broadening civic participation in large-scale decision-making.

Alexis Pister
Alexis specialises in information visualisation, visual analytics, and network visualisation. He designs interactive systems for exploring complex data and has developed methods to visualise historical documents as social networks with an emphasis on traceability and explainability. His current work explores representations for dynamic hypergraphs.

Ali Sarvghad Batn Moghaddam
Ali researches visualisation and interaction techniques that support exploratory data analysis and sense-making. He also applies data visualisation approaches in domains such as healthcare and business to help users uncover insights from complex datasets.

Computer Graphics, Visualisation, and Visual Computing (CGVC) will be hosted by giCentre in London this September

We are hosting the 42nd annual conference on Computer Graphics, Visualisation, and Visual Computing (CGVC 2024) in London on 12th and 13th September.

Our programme is available. We have confimed keynotes from the excellent Petra Isenberg and Rachel McDonnell. We will have a special session on Human-centred Decision-Making through Data Visualisation, with talks on cutting-edge EPSRC-funded visualisation research across the UK. We will also have an “Vis in Practice” industry panel Our social events at the end of the first day will help you connect with others as different career stages in the field of visualisation and visual computing.

Registration is open. Please register!

Best Reviewer award for EuroVis 2024 for Jo Wood

Jo Wood was awarded Best Reviewer award for EuroVis 2024 for "strik[ing] an admirable balance between encouragement and constructive criticism" in a way that helps with "nurturing the growth of early-career researchers". Well done!