CS 7942-001 Fall 2025 Visualization Seminar

Course Information

Meeting Time: Wednesdays, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM  

Classroom: WEB 3780 (Pizza will be served!)

Textbook: None

Contact Information:

Instructor: Dr. Andrew McNutt
Office: WEB 4628 
Email: andrew.mcnutt@utah.edu, do not use canvas message
Office Hours: By appointment

Course Description

The Visualization Seminar (VIS Seminar) presents the state-of-the-art in data visualization research, in the form of invited talks and student presentations.  Successful completion of the course will enable the students to pursue new research directions in data visualization and apply new visualization techniques to data in application domains.

Course Logistics

The Visualization Seminar is a research focused seminar exploring topics in data visualization.

The Seminar will typically be held every other week, with a few exceptions, e.g., because of fall break, or the need for an extra slot. Please monitor the mailing list and SCI website for updates. 

We will feature excellent speakers from the visualization community, predominantly remotely, but also in person whenever possible. We would also like to use the VIS seminar as an opportunity for students to present research work, for example, to practice a talk for a conference. 

The first seminar is on Wednesday, August 20 2025 at noon in WEB 3780, Evans Conference Room.

Please see this spreadsheet for the most up to date schedule

Additional Wednesdays may be added when necessary, e.g. student conference practice talks, surprise visitors, and so on. These are also required.   

The mailing list for the seminar is vis-seminar@sci.utah.edu – make sure to subscribe to be notified. 

Grading

For those of you taking the class for credit, we will evaluate your participation as follows: instead of presenting a paper in the seminar, you will submit brief summaries for each of the talks in the seminar. These summaries should be about two paragraphs, but certainly less than 1 page and should be submitted via canvas. These will be evaluated as "no credit" (such as for not engaging with the material or doing so only liminally) or "appropriate" (for an appropriate engagement with the material). 

We are scheduled to have 7 seminars, however incidents and accidents happen and that number is sometimes fewer. If we instead had 6, then 6 reasonable submissions will correspond to an A, 5 to an A-, 4 to a B+, 3 to a B, 2 to a B-, 1 to a C, and 0 to an E. Similarly sometimes something special happens and we have a surprise visitor, for which we might have more seminars than initially planned. 

Please note that attendance in person is required. You will not receive credit for your submission if you do not attend.