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 a researcher, university lecturer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work pushes the boundaries of audiovisual communication, exploring the intersections of art, science, and technology. He combines academic rigor with a critical, humanistic practice rooted in experimentation and oriented toward social and cultural impact. He holds a BA in International Relations, an MA in Communication Sciences (Science, Culture and Heritage), and a PhD in Digital Media, based on an arts-based research project developed between the University of Porto and Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. R. B. Brenner, focused on the relationship between 360-degree video, participatory storytelling, and social transformation. Over more than fifteen years, he has built a hybrid trajectory spanning immersive and interactive media, pedagogical innovation, performance, and experimental arts, investigating new audiovisual grammars and languages. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and Assistant Professor at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where he researches the potential of XR and other emerging technologies as mediators of knowledge and experience. His artistic work has been presented in internationally recognized contexts such as the Sommerset House, Venice Biennale, and Cannes XR, reflecting a creative practice that draws on scientific thinking to think with images, experiment through the body, and interrogate the sensory and political relations between humans and technology.