The Value of Visualization in the Era of Generative AI
Generative AI has made an old question newly urgent: what is visualization for? Visualization is increasingly positioned as a supporting layer in AI pipelines, used to inspect models, explain outputs, or communicate results to stakeholders. If the field accepts this role as its future, it risks losing both intellectual independence and real-world relevance. In this talk, I suggest a different direction. I return to decision making, especially decisions that bear on people’s lives, values, and futures, unfold through evolving criteria and contested trade-offs, and cannot be offloaded to a single system output. Here, the question is not how to serve automation, but what visualization can uniquely contribute when decisions still need to be thought through. Drawing on decision making research, user-centered studies, and work on visualization and AI-assisted decision support, I argue that visualization need not be only a tool for explanation, but could also help people think, deliberate, and decide. I reflect on what this means for the field and on the shifts visualization research may require if it is to meet this challenge.
Evanthia Dimara
Evanthia Dimara is a Tenured Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, active in the visualization and HCI research communities through publications, reviewing, editorial and organizational roles in venues such as IEEE VIS, TVCG, and CHI. Drawing on perspectives across disciplines, her research focuses on decision making: how interactive systems can help people make informed and unbiased decisions, alone or in groups. She is especially interested in the kinds of decisions for which current decision-support systems, formal models, and human heuristics tend to fail.
The future is not a headset: art and knowledge in the age of technological euphoria
XR is not a shortcut to understanding and “immersion” is not synonymous with impact. This keynote builds on a set of arts-based experiments in science and heritage communication, developed with transdisciplinary teams and supported by iterative prototyping, to advance a simple thesis: the decisive question is not whether we adopt technology, but how we design experience, interpretation, and our relationship with knowledge. Drawing on examples in virtual and mixed reality, 360-degree video, immersive sound, and generative AI, the talk proposes a non-technocentric notion of immersion (situated presence, interpretive agency, and semantic density) and shifts the focus from “engagement” as retention to interpretability and cognitive–affective commitment: the moment when the public stops being a spectator and enters into dialogue with scientific and heritage objects. Method sits at the centre: co-creation as epistemic translation (learning to “speak the other’s language,” without cosmetic interdisciplinarity) and XR as a space for reflection, i.e., thinking through making, rather than merely illustrating stabilized knowledge. This is where “productive frictions” emerge: scientific precision and artistic interpretation, critical trust built through transparency, and the recognition that emotion is not ornament, but infrastructure for learning and memory. The keynote closes with a challenge to the conference: if technologies like XR and AI have real potential in niches such as science and heritage, that potential depends less on the device and more on a medium-native mindset, one that refuses “promptstitution”, escapes the linear tyranny of “point A → point B,” and creates the conditions for an ethics of attention (focus, presence, slowness) within a digital ecosystem that accelerates everything. The future may pass through headsets, but the future of knowledge depends on criteria.
António Baía Reis
António Baía Reis is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across immersive media, performance, music, and experimental audiovisual forms. His practice explores how emerging technologies can become poetic and critical tools for narrating science, heritage, memory, and contemporary social experience. While immersive media lies at the core of his work, his artistic language is inherently hybrid, shaped by his background in acting and music and unfolding through moving image, live performance, sound, and interactive environments. His work has been presented internationally at leading artistic contexts including Somerset House in London, Venice Immersive at La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Cinema, and the Cannes XR Immersive Competition at the Festival de Cannes. Rooted in an arts-based PhD in Digital Media and more than fifteen years of interdisciplinary creation, Reis approaches VR, AR, MR, 360° film, and AI not as technological spectacle but as dramaturgical and compositional materials. His doctoral research, developed between the University of Porto and Stanford University under the supervision of R. B. Brenner, former Washington Post editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, focused on 360° immersive filmmaking, participatory storytelling, and social change. His projects frequently blur the boundaries between documentary and performance, research and artistic experimentation, engaging with questions of presence, embodiment, memory, intangible heritage, identity, and cultural transmission. A former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and recipient of a Ramón y Cajal Postdoctoral Fellowship, he is currently an Assistant Researcher at the University of Aveiro and an Integrated and Senior Researcher at DigiMedia, where his research and artistic practice investigate the intersections of communication, culture, emerging media, and human–technology relations.