I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining UMD, I worked at Adobe Research as a research scientist and at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow. I received my PhD degree in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech.
Research
I direct the Human-Data Interaction Research Group, whose mission is to support interactive data analysis and data-driven communication by synthesizing human-centered methodologies and artificial intelligence. The group's current research focuses on developing human-centered AI techniques and systems for (1) example-driven data visualization generation and design, and (2) data analysis planning and execution. My group applies multidisciplinary methods to address these research problems and contribute empirical studies, theoretical frameworks, datasets/benchmarks, and interactive techniques/systems.
If you are an undergraduate or Master's student at UMD looking for research opportunities with me, please read this page first.
News
- Feb. '25: Two full papers accepted at CHI 2025: comparing collaborative writing behaviors using visual analytics, and studies on how business professionals conduct and perceive what-if analysis.
- Aug. '24: Our paper on manipulable semantic components receives an Honorable Mention award at IEEE VIS 2024.
- Jul. '24: Three full papers and one short paper accepted at VIS 2024: the influence of examples on visualization design outcomes, manipulable semantic components, a multi-level task framework for event sequence analytics, and evaluating the semantic profiling abilities of LLMs.
- Jul. '24: Received a DARPA STTR contract on Reasoned Cyber Visualization (Phase I).
- Jul. '24: Paper on the effects of turn-taking order and AI-powered editing tools on collaborative writing accepted at CSCW 2024.
- May. '24: Paper on AI-assisted mixed media tutorial creation accepted at CHI 2024.
- Nov. '23: Joining the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) as an Associate Editor.
- Jul. '23: Paper on deconstructing SVG charts for layout reuse accepted at VIS 2023.
- Jul. '23: Received an NSF CAREER Award.
- Jun. '23: Two short papers on authoring responsive documents with Layout Generation and guided data analysis in computational notebooks accepted at VL/HCC 2023.
- May '23: Two papers on the state of the art in visualization corpora for automated chart analysis and comparative evaluation of visual summarization techniques for event sequences accepted at EuroVis 2023.
- Aug. '22: Giving a keynote talk on "Towards Scalable and Interpretable Visual Analytics" at the Visualization in Data Science workshop at ACM KDD.
- Jul. '22: Paper on how visualization designers find and use examples accepted at VIS 2022.
Featured Projects
Contact
- Department of Computer Science
- Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering
- University of Maryland
- 8125 Paint Branch Drive
- College Park, MD 20742
Email: leozcliu at umd.edu
CV (updated 6/7/2025)
Google Scholar | LinkedIn | Twitter
Travels and Talks
-
Apr. '25: Dagstuhl Seminar
Wadern, Germany -
Jan. '25: Georgia Tech
Visualization Lab -
Oct. '24: IEEE VIS
St. Pete Beach, FL -
May. '24: ACM CHI
Honolulu, HI -
Oct. '23: Stanford University
HCI Seminar -
Sep. '23: Virginia Tech
Falls Church, VA - Aug. '23: HFES Webinar
-
Jun. '23: EuroVis
Leipzig, Germany -
Apr. '23: MIT
Cambridge, MA
