EVL Professors Khairi Reda and Saeed Boorboor Awarded NSF Grant for Visualization Evaluation

The National Science Foundation has awarded HCC: Rethinking Visualization Evaluation through Image-Based Models of Human Vision to EVL Associate Professor Khairi Reda as PI, with EVL Assistant Professor Saeed Boorboor as co-PI. The three-year, $500,000 project develops computational tools for evaluating visualizations that reduce the field’s reliance on expensive human subject studies.

Data visualizations drive consequential decisions, from picking a stock to reading a medical scan. Before settling on an effective design, a designer typically tests several candidates with users to find the one that leads to the best decisions. That process is costly and slow, and its results can be imprecise: small changes to a visualization or to its underlying data can render a previously effective design unreliable.

The project’s approach is to simulate how the human visual system responds to a visualization image, then judge effectiveness by whether that simulated response faithfully preserves the data properties encoded in the image. The team will extend existing models of texture perception to operate on visualization images, using them to predict which data properties survive the early-to-mid visual cortex and are therefore available to support the viewer’s perception and judgment. The framework will be validated against empirical data from controlled human studies spanning a range of chart and map types, data properties, and visual inference tasks, and the resulting algorithms will be calibrated against those study results.

The models will be released as accessible, open-source software so that designers and researchers can assess visualizations without running user studies. The team will also translate the methods into a visualization tool for biomedical scientists evaluating how well potential cancer treatments might work for individual patients.

If successful, the work shifts visualization evaluation from a labor-intensive empirical practice toward a more principled, scalable, model-based analysis, with implications for how visualizations are designed, tested, and deployed across scientific and public-facing domains.

Congratulations to Khairi and Saeed!

Award Details

Sponsor: National Science Foundation
PI: Khairi Reda
Co-PI: Saeed Boorboor
Period: October 2026 to September 2029
Amount: $500,000