Shiyao Li (李诗尧)

I'm a 4th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Informatics at Emory, fortunate to be advised by Dr. Emily Wall and to work closely with Dr. Cindy Xiong Bearfield.

I'm a visualization researcher exploring how human/visualization design factors shape visualization interpretations through the lens of confirmation bias. My works combine both quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how individuals reason with visual data.

Specifically, I look into three questions:

  • How to elicit attitudes and beliefs more accurately and expressively?
  • How to identify confirmation bias in both static and interactive visualization?
  • Which types of interventions could we employ to mitigate biases?

Projects

Enhance the Expressiveness of Elicitation Tools through Visual Representations.

In this project, we explore visual and textual representations of beliefs and attitudes through a two-round qualitative study (N = 41) and investigate their potential to enhance the expressiveness of elicited data. Participants expressed their attitudes and beliefs (i) visually, through hand-drawn sketches, and (ii) verbally, through text. We identified five key elements in the sketches: emotions, directional attitudes, structural beliefs, uncertainty, and topics, and analyzed how these elements interact, using the textual elicitations to disambiguate sketches. Current draft is under revision.


Elicitation GIF

Impacts of Data Facts on Confirmation Bias in Visual Data Reasoning

In this project, we conducted a series of crowdsourced experiments to explore the biasing effects of data facts. Our findings show that the presentation style, strength, and alignment of data facts with pre-existing beliefs significantly impact confirmation bias. Data facts that support prior beliefs can exacerbate confirmation bias, whereas those that refute those beliefs can mitigate it. This effect is amplified when the data facts are used in combination with visual annotations. Data facts describing variable correlations are perceived to be more compelling than ones describing average values and are associated with higher levels of confirmation bias. Current work is under review.


Visualization Designs

Apart from my research, I also enjoy prototyping "unconventional" visualization for the project Data by Design - a digital book chronicling the history of data visualization.

Design 1
Visualizing Resistance in Slave Trade Voyages
An earlier implementation.
Design 2
Visualizing Hidden Labor Behind the Creation of the Website.

Publications

Adapting Educational Technologies across Learner Populations: A Usability Study with Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum.
Zi, Xiaoman, Li, Shiyao, Roxanne Rashedi, Marian Rushdy, Ben Lane, Shitanshu Mishra, Gautam Biswas et al.
42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2020. PDF

Characterizing datasets for social visual question answering, and the new TinySocial dataset
Chen, Zhanwen, Shiyao Li, Roxanne Rashedi, Xiaoman Zi, Morgan Elrod-Erickson, Bryan Hollis, Angela Maliakal, Xinyu Shen, Simeng Zhao, and Maithilee Kunda.
Joint IEEE 10th International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob), 2020. PDF