Yong Wang Turns Visualization Into Insights

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

For his work within the subject, the IEEE Laptop Society visualization and graphics technical committee introduced him with its 2025 Important New Researcher Award. The popularity highlights his rising affect in fields together with human-computer interplay 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 assist themselves.

Wang’s mother and father labored in agriculture too, and his father typically traveled to cities to earn cash working in a manufacturing facility or on building jobs. The additional revenue helped assist the household and made it doable 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 individuals perceive info, then extra individuals can take part in science and innovation. That’s the true energy of visualization.”

Expertise was scarce within the village, he says. Computer systems have been virtually nonexistent, and televisions have been thought-about valuable, costly family possessions.

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

“My mom was very indignant,” he recollects. “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 gear, he was fascinated by the applied sciences he noticed on TV reveals.

Discovering robotics and engineering

His mother and father inspired a sensible profession resembling medication or civil engineering, however he felt drawn to robotics and computing, he says.

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

He enrolled at Harbin Institute of Expertise, in northeastern China. The esteemed college is understood for its engineering packages. His main—automation— mixed components of electrical engineering, robotics, and management programs.

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 programs, he acknowledges. However, he says, the expertise was exhilarating. His crew positioned second, and Wang started to see engineering as each artistic and collaborative.

He graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in 2011 and briefly labored as an assistant on the Analysis Institute of Clever Management and Techniques 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 sample recognition and picture processing from the Huazhong College of Science and Expertise, in Wuhan, China, in 2016.

He then enrolled within the pc science Ph.D. program on the Hong Kong College of Science and Expertise and earned the diploma in 2018. He remained there as a postdoctoral researcher till 2020, when he moved to Singapore to hitch Singapore Administration College as an assistant professor of computing and data programs. He moved over to Nanyang Technological College as an assistant professor in 2024.

His analysis focuses on a problem dealing with practically each enterprise: tips on how to make sense of the big quantities of information being generated.

“We dwell in an period of knowledge 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.”

Knowledge visualization provides an answer by turning complicated info into pictures, 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 giant language fashions and multimodal programs that may generate textual content, pictures, video, and sensor knowledge concurrently and automate elements of the method.

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

One other focus of Wang’s analysis is human-AI collaboration. AI programs can analyze knowledge at monumental scale, however individuals nonetheless must 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 individuals perceive how the AI system works,” Wang says, “they’ll collaborate with it extra successfully.”

He not too long ago explored how visualization methods may assist researchers perceive quantum computing, a subject the place core ideas—resembling superposition, the place a bit could 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, could be 1, 0, or each. The variations get extra dizzying from there.

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

The significance of IEEE communities

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

Skilled communities such because the IEEE Laptop Society, he says, play a significant function in serving to him rework early-stage graduate college students uncertain of which strains 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 Important 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 outstanding. However, he says, the journey displays one thing bigger about his chosen subject: “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.”