About Me

Hi, I’m Arran Zeyu Wang, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, advised by Prof. David Gotz in the VACLab and Prof. Danielle Albers Szafir in the VisuaLab. Prior to that, I was a Data Visualization Engineer at Ant Group. I received my M.Sc. and B.Eng. degrees from Shandong University, China.

My research interest includes information visualization, perception/cognition, and visual analytics. I’m interested in exploring how people understand data from visualizations to build accessible, intelligent, and empirically grounded tools for easier exploratory data analysis and decision-making.

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • Best Paper Honorable Mention, IEEE VIS 2025.
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention, IEEE VIS 2024.
  • Best Short Paper, EuroVis 2024.

📝 Research

Causal Inference with Visualizations

  • Causal Priors and Their Influence on Judgements of Causality in Visualized Data
    A. Z. Wang, D. Borland, T. C. Peck, W. Wang, and D. Gotz.
    IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. VIS 2024), 2025.

  • Beyond Correlation: Incorporating Counterfactual Guidance to Better Support Exploratory Visual Analysis
    A. Z. Wang, D. Borland, and D. Gotz.
    IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. VIS 2024), 2025.
    Best Paper Honorable Mention 🏅

  • A Framework to Improve Causal Inferences from Visualizations Using Counterfactual Operators
    A. Z. Wang, D. Borland, and D. Gotz.
    Information Visualization, 2024.

  • An Empirical Study of Counterfactual Visualization to Support Visual Causal Inference
    A. Z. Wang, D. Borland, and D. Gotz.
    Information Visualization, 2024.

Visualization Comprehension and Psychology

  • Characterizing Visualization Perception with Psychological Phenomena: Uncovering the Role of Subitizing in Data Visualization
    A. Z. Wang, G. J. Quadri, M. Zhu, C. Tseng, and D. Albers Szafir.
    IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. VIS 2025), 2026.
    Best Paper Honorable Mention 🏅

  • Revisiting Categorical Color Perception in Scatterplots: Sequential, Diverging, and Categorical Palettes
    C. Tseng, A. Z. Wang, G. J. Quadri, and D. Albers Szafir.
    EG/VGTC Conference on Visualization (EuroVis), 2024.
    Best Short Paper 🏆

  • Do You See What I See? A Qualitative Study Eliciting High-Level Visualization Comprehension
    G. J. Quadri, A. Z. Wang, Z. Wang, J. Adorno, P. Rosen, and D. Albers Szafir.
    ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2024.

Data Accessibility and Storytelling

  • Our Stories, Our Data: Co-designing Visualizations with People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
    K. Wu, G. J. Quadri, A. Z. Wang, D. K. Osei-Tutu, E. Peterson, V. Koushik, and D. Albers Szafir.
    ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS), 2024.

💬 Invited Talk

  • 2024.11, Understanding and Supporting Visual Causal Inference Using Counterfactuals
    CIRG Seminar, Department of Epidemiology, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
    Hosted by Prof. Daniel Westreich