Data Science & AI Lecture Series
Visualization and Judgment: Human-Centered Computing in Data-Rich Practice
Paul Parsons
Visualization and Judgment: Human-Centered Computing in Data-Rich Practice
| When | Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM (MT) |
|---|---|
| Where | WEB 3780 |
Abstract
Visualization and computational systems are increasingly powerful, but their impact depends on a persistent, often under-specified factor—human judgment. Designers frame problems and negotiate constraints; users interpret, challenge, and coordinate action around system outputs over time, under uncertainty and constraint. In this talk, I present a research agenda on visualization and judgment in data-rich work, grounded in empirical studies and design-oriented analyses across three contexts. First, I study data visualization design practice, showing how professional designers frame problems and co-evolve problem and solution spaces—work that is often invisible in pipeline-oriented accounts of visualization. Second, I examine expert judgment in complex sociotechnical settings, where visualization, procedures, and automation reshape decision spaces and can either support adaptive performance or encourage brittle reliance. Third, I extend these insights to scientific cyberinfrastructure, where platforms exposing advanced computation and data services succeed or fail based on whether diverse communities can understand, adopt, and sustain capabilities in practice. This perspective complements advances in modeling, simulation, and visual analytics by surfacing design constraints, evaluation targets, and failure modes that matter as systems intersect with the constraints and contingencies of practice. I close with directions for judgment-aware visualization and human–AI support that preserve interpretability, accountability, and coordination in consequential domains.
Speaker
Paul Parsons
Paul Parsons is an Associate Professor in the School of Applied and Creative Computing at Purdue University. His research focuses on interactive visualization systems and interfaces and how they are designed and used in complex sociotechnical settings. His work at the intersection of design practice and data visualization has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award and a recent IEEE VIS best-paper recognition. His broader research program has also been supported by NSF and NASA funding. His work appears in leading venues such as IEEE TVCG and ACM CHI. He leads the Design, Visualization, & Cognition (DVC) Lab, where his group studies how practitioners think, create, and collaborate in data-rich domains shaped by uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, drawing on perspectives such as design cognition, judgment and decision-making, and joint cognitive systems. He collaborates widely across disciplines at Purdue and beyond, including through the NSF-funded Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence SGX3 and the NASA-funded Resilient Extra Terrestrial Habitats Institute (RETHi).
Tags: human-centered computing visualization
Part of the Data Science & AI Lecture Series. Something wrong on this page? Edit _data/talks/2026-02-24-paul-parsons.toml.