Yong Wang Turns Visualization Into Insights

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

For his work within the discipline, 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 changing into extra vital 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 financial system was nonetheless creating, and life in his village was modest. Most households in Hunan grew rice, greens, and fruit to help themselves.

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

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

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

Expertise was scarce within the village, he says. Computer systems had been virtually nonexistent, and televisions had been thought of treasured, costly household possessions.

One childhood reminiscence nonetheless makes him snort: 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 indignant,” he recollects. “At the moment, a TV was a really precious factor.”

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

Discovering robotics and engineering

His mother and father inspired a sensible profession akin to medication 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 seemed thrilling and superior.”

He enrolled at Harbin Institute of Technology, in northeastern China. The esteemed college is understood 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 workforce 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 faculty, he says.

Constructing instruments that assist people work with AI

Wang obtained 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 practically each enterprise: methods to make sense of the big quantities of knowledge being generated.

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

Information visualization presents an answer by turning complicated data 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 resolution 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 complicated infographics via natural-language directions mixed with easy interactions akin to drawing on a touchscreen with a finger. It permits nontechnical folks to generate visualizations as an alternative of hiring skilled designers.

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

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

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

He lately explored how visualization methods might assist researchers perceive quantum computing, a discipline the place core ideas—akin to superposition, the place a bit might 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, might be 1, 0, or each. The variations get extra dizzying from there.

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

The significance of IEEE communities

Educating 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 significant function in serving to him rework early-stage graduate college students not sure of which strains of inquiry they may pursue into impartial researchers with a stable technical focus. By way of 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.

Wanting again, he says, the gap between his rural village in Hunan and a world analysis profession nonetheless feels outstanding. However, he says, the journey displays one thing bigger about his chosen discipline: “If we construct instruments that assist folks perceive data, then extra folks can take part in science and innovation.

“That’s the actual energy of visualization.”