Yong Wang Turns Visualization Into Insights

“Visualization helps individuals perceive advanced concepts,” Wang says. “If we design these instruments effectively, they’ll make superior applied sciences accessible to everybody.”

For his work within the area, the IEEE Computer Society visualization and graphics technical committee offered him with its 2025 Significant New Researcher Award. The popularity highlights his rising affect in fields together with human-computer interaction and human-AI collaboration—areas turning into extra necessary because the world generates extra knowledge than people can simply interpret.

Rising up in rural Hunan

Wang was born in southwestern Hunan Province. China’s economic system was nonetheless growing, and life in his village was modest. Most households in Hunan grew rice, greens, and fruit to help themselves.

Wang’s dad and mom labored in agriculture too, and his father usually traveled to cities to earn cash working in a manufacturing facility or on development jobs. The additional revenue helped help the household and made it doable for Wang to attend faculty.

“I’m very grateful to my dad and mom,” Wang says. “They by no means attended college, however they strongly supported my training.”

“If we construct instruments that assist individuals perceive info, then extra individuals can take part in science and innovation. That’s the true energy of visualization.”

Know-how was scarce within the village, he says. Computer systems had been nearly nonexistent, and televisions had been thought of valuable, costly household possessions.

One childhood reminiscence nonetheless makes him snicker: Throughout a summer time trip, he and his brother spent so many hours taking part in video games on a easy console linked to the household’s television that the TV display ultimately burned out.

“My mom was very offended,” he remembers. “At the moment, a TV was a really worthwhile factor.”

He says that regardless of by no means having used a laptop computer or experimenting with digital tools, he was fascinated by the applied sciences he noticed on TV exhibits.

Discovering robotics and engineering

His dad and mom inspired a sensible profession equivalent to drugs or civil engineering, however he felt drawn to robotics and computing, he says.

“I didn’t actually perceive what laptop science concerned,” he says. “However from what I noticed on TV, it regarded thrilling and superior.”

He enrolled at Harbin Institute of Technology, in northeastern China. The esteemed college is thought for its engineering applications. His main—automation— mixed components of electrical engineering, robotics, and control systems.

One of many defining experiences of his undergraduate years, he says, was a college robotics competitors. Wang and his teammates designed a robotic able to autonomously navigating round obstacles.

The design was easy in contrast with skilled techniques, he acknowledges. However, he says, the expertise was exhilarating. His staff positioned second, and Wang started to see engineering as each inventive and collaborative.

He graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in 2011 and briefly labored as an assistant on the Research Institute of Intelligent Control and Systems at Harbin.

In 2014 he took a place as a analysis intern working at Da Jiang Innovation in Shenzhen, China.

That have helped him make clear his future, he says: “I noticed I didn’t get pleasure from doing repetitive work or just following directions. I needed to discover concepts that me, and I needed to conduct analysis.” The conclusion pushed him towards graduate college, he says.

Constructing instruments that assist people work with AI

Wang acquired a grasp’s diploma in pattern recognition and image processing from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in Wuhan, China, in 2016.

He then enrolled within the laptop science Ph.D. program on the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and earned the diploma in 2018. He remained there as a postdoctoral researcher till 2020, when he moved to Singapore to affix Singapore Management University as an assistant professor of computing and data techniques. He moved over to Nanyang Technological University as an assistant professor in 2024.

His analysis focuses on a problem dealing with almost each enterprise: the right way to make sense of the big quantities of information being generated.

“We reside in an period of data explosions,” Wang says. “Large quantities of information are generated, and it’s troublesome for individuals to interpret all of it to make higher enterprise selections.”

Information visualization gives an answer by turning advanced info into photos, patterns, and diagrams that individuals can extra readily perceive.

However many visualizations nonetheless have to be designed manually by consultants, Wang notes. It’s a time-consuming course of that creates a bottleneck, he says.

His answer is to make use of large language models and multimodal techniques that may generate textual content, photos, video, and sensor knowledge concurrently and automate components of the method.

One system developed by his analysis group lets customers design advanced infographics via natural-language directions mixed with easy interactions equivalent to drawing on a touchscreen with a finger. It permits nontechnical individuals to generate visualizations as a substitute of hiring skilled designers.

One other focus of Wang’s analysis is human-AI collaboration. AI techniques can analyze knowledge at monumental scale, however individuals nonetheless have to be the ultimate decision-makers, he says.

Visualization helps bridge the hole between human intention and AI’s advanced calculations by making the method an AI system makes use of to achieve a consequence extra clear and comprehensible.

“If individuals perceive how the AI system works,” Wang says, “they’ll collaborate with it extra successfully.”

He not too long ago explored how visualization strategies may assist researchers perceive quantum computing, a area the place core ideas—equivalent to superposition, the place a bit may be in a couple of state at a time—are summary. In classical computing, the bit state is binary: It’s both 1 or 0. A quantum bit, or qubit, may be 1, 0, or each. The variations get extra dizzying from there.

Visualization instruments may assist scientists monitor quantum techniques and interpret quantum machine-learning fashions, he says.

The significance of IEEE communities

Instructing and mentoring college students stay among the many most significant components of Wang’s profession, he says.

Skilled communities such because the IEEE Computer Society, he says, play a serious function in serving to him rework early-stage graduate college students uncertain of which traces of inquiry they are going to pursue into unbiased researchers with a strong technical focus. By conferences, publications, and technical committees, IEEE connects Wang with different researchers working in visualization, AI, and human-computer interactions, he says.

These connections have helped him share concepts, collaborate, and keep updated on improvements within the analysis neighborhood.

Receiving the Vital New Researcher award motivates him to proceed pushing the sphere ahead, he says.

Trying again, he says, the space between his rural village in Hunan and a global analysis profession nonetheless feels exceptional. However, he says, the journey displays one thing bigger about his chosen area: “If we construct instruments that assist individuals perceive info, then extra individuals can take part in science and innovation.

“That’s the true energy of visualization.”