The IEEE VIS, the leading conference on visualization research, took place in Phoenix, Arizona, USA from October 1 to 6. Ricardo Langner and Tom Horak represented the Interactive Media Lab with both a paper and a poster. On Tuesday, Ricardo gave his talk on our paper VisTiles: Coordinating and Combining Co-located Mobile Devices for Visual Data Exploration in the opening session of the InfoVis track. Notably, the first ideas for VisTiles were presented as a poster at VIS last year, received an honorable mention, and became now a full paper. Our second contribution was presented on Wednesday: Tom showed and explained our poster Improving Value Driver Trees to Enhance Business Data Analysis (poster PDF) during the poster session. Again, IEEE VIS has been an exciting and inspiring conference as also can be seen in our photo gallery.

We are really happy to see that the topic of natural user interfaces (NUI) for information visualization is getting more important in the VIS community. For instance, the Immersive Analytics workshop on Sunday comprised exciting papers as well as poster and initiated interesting discussion about future directions. This intersection of NUI and InfoVis is also addressed by our VisTiles paper.

The week-long conference consists of three tracks: IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis), IEEE Scientific Visualization (SciVis). The papers presented in these tracks will be published in a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) journal. The dense and interesting conference program is completed by a number of tutorials, workshops, panels, as well as an art program. Next year, the conference will take place in Berlin, Germany from October 21 to 26.