[MAKING] DESIGN MODES: Design research

Dr. Nan Cao is a professor from TongJi College of Design and Innovation. He is the director of the Intelligent Big Data Visualization Lab at Tongji University. He received his PhD degree from the computer science and engineering department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining Tongji, Nan Cao was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and he worked for IBM for 10 years during 2005 - 2015. His primary expertise and research interests are data visualization and intelligent visual communication design. He has over 90 papers published in top international conferences such as IEEE VIS and ACM CHI. He received many career awards including the IBM outstanding technical award, IBM outstanding research achievement award, and the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. His team invented Calliope·Data (https://datacalliope.com), the world’s first intelligent tool for automatically design and generating visual narrations based input data.

Keynote Title: Intelligent Visualization Design

The advent of the artificial intelligence era has brought unprecedented changes and opportunities to the design field. In the past few years, we have witnessed how various intelligent generative algorithms have influenced design methods and tools. On the one hand, the application of these intelligent algorithms and technologies in the design field has brought new opportunities to inspire designers and improve the ability of human-machine collaborative creation. On the other hand, however, the limited explainability of deep learning models has made the creation process difficult to control. In the past five years, we have devoted ourselves to the research of interpretable intelligent design theories and methods. We first proposed the concept and paradigm of "design space", on which we introduced new design methods, techniques, and tools combining reinforcement learning and collaborative intelligence. We then applied these techniques to intelligent data visualization design and built a prototype system, Calliope, for automatically designing and generating data stories based on user input. In this talk, we summarize our recent works and present them to the design research community for the first time.

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Keynote Date

7 Dec (Tue) 09:00 HKT

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