The advances in AI-enabled techniques have accelerated the creation and automation of visualizations in the past decade. However, presenting visualizations in a descriptive and generative format remains a challenge. Moreover, current visualization embedding methods focus on standalone visualizations, neglecting the importance of contextual information for multi-view visualizations. To address this issue, we propose a new representation model, Chart2Vec, to learn a universal embedding of visualizations with context-aware information. Chart2Vec aims to support a wide range of downstream visualization tasks such as recommendation and storytelling. Our model considers both structural and semantic information of visualizations in declarative specifications. To enhance the context-aware capability, Chart2Vec employs multi-task learning on both supervised and unsupervised tasks concerning the cooccurrence of visualizations. We evaluate our method through an ablation study, a user study, and a quantitative comparison. The results verified the consistency of our embedding method with human cognition and showed its advantages over existing methods.

Unfamiliar measurements usually hinder readers from grasping the scale of the numerical data, understanding the content, and feeling engaged with the context. To enhance data comprehension and communication, we leverage analogies to bridge the gap between abstract data and familiar measurements. In this work, we first conduct semi-structured interviews with design experts to identify design problems and summarize design considerations. Then, we collect an analogy dataset of 138 cases from various online sources. Based on the collected dataset, we characterize a design space for creating data analogies. Next, we build a prototype system, AnalogyMate, that automatically suggests data analogies, their corresponding design solutions, and generated visual representations powered by generative AI. The study results show the usefulness of AnalogyMate in aiding the creation process of data analogies and the effectiveness of data analogy in enhancing data comprehension and communication.

Graph or network data are widely studied in both data mining and visualization communities to review the relationship among different entities and groups. The data facts derived from graph visual analysis are important to help understand the social structures of complex data, especially for data journalism. However, it is challenging for data journalists to discover graph data facts and manually organize correlated facts around a meaningful topic due to the complexity of graph data and the difficulty to interpret graph narratives. Therefore, we present an automatic graph facts generation system, Calliope-Net, which consists of a fact discovery module, a fact organization module, and a visualization module. It creates annotated node-link diagrams with facts automatically discovered and organized from network data. A novel layout algorithm is designed to present meaningful and visually appealing annotated graphs. We evaluate the proposed system with two case studies and an in-lab user study. The results show that Calliope-Net can benefit users in discovering and understanding graph data facts with visually pleasing annotated visualizations.

KeJia is a domestic service robot, consisting of a mobile base, an arm, two cameras, and a set of software components for perception, manipulation, natural language understanding, motion and task planning, and decision making. With on-line running of these functions, a robot can adapt to dynamic environments which may have unexpected changes. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical method which combines motion planning with a neural network, so that the robot can tolerate errors from sensors, wear of parts, and human disturbances during motion execution. We evaluate our work on KeJia that cooks popcorn using a microwave oven, where humans try to disturb KeJia during the operation.