Cindy Ya Yang
Xiong

General Information

Email:
cxiong@gatech.edu
Phone:
(404) 894-2000
Location - Building:
TSRB
Location - Room:
332
Roles:
Professor (any rank)
Primary Unit:
School of Interactive Computing
Website URL
https://cyxiong.com/

Details

Degrees with subject and Postdoc Experience:
Degree Type
Ph.D.
Subject
Psychology
Year
2021
Institution
Northwestern University
Location
Evanston, IL
Degree Type
M.S.
Subject
Statistics
Year
2021
Institution
Northwestern University
Location
Evanston, IL
Degree Type
M.S.
Subject
Psychology
Year
2018
Institution
Northwestern
Location
Evanston, IL
Degree Type
B.S.
Subject
Applied Mathematics
Year
2016
Institution
UCLA
Location
Los Angeles, CA
Degree Type
B.S.
Subject
Psychology
Year
2016
Institution
UCLA
Location
Los Angeles, CA
Statement of Research Interests:

My research bridges psychology and data visualization to understand how people perceive, reason with, and make decisions from visual data. Through empirical studies of human cognition, I design visualizations and AI-supported tools that help people build calibrated trust in complex information, supporting clearer analysis, compelling storytelling, and thoughtful engagement with AI.

Statement of Teaching Interests:

I teach courses at the intersection of data visualization and human perception. These concepts equip students to design clearer, more trustworthy, and more effective analytical tools. By integrating theory with hands-on practice and application examples, I help students develop intuition for how visual encoding, interaction, and principles of human perception and cognition influence visual data communication and decision-making.

Selection of recent research, scholarly, and creative activities:

Wang, H. W., Lin, K., Cohen, A., Kennedy, R., Zwald, Z., Nobre, C., & Xiong, C. (2025). Do You" Trust" This Visualization? An Inventory to Measure Trust in Visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.

Li, Shiyao, Davidson, T., Xiong, C., Wall, E. (2025).Confirmation Bias: The Double-Edged Sword of Data Facts in Visual Data Communication. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. DOI: 10.1145/3706598.371383.

Chang, M., Wang, Y., Wang, H., Zhou, Y., Bulling, A., Xiong Bearfield, C. (2025). Tell Me Without Telling Me: Two-Way Prediction of Visualization Literacy and Visual Attention. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE VIS 2025. DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3634815.

Bae, S., Cave, K., Carsten, G., Rosen, P., Szafir, D., Xiong, C. (2025) Bridging Network Science and Vision Science: Mapping Perceptual Mechanisms to Network Visualization Tasks. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3541571.

Wang, H., Hoffswell, J., Thane, S., Bursztyn, V., Xiong, C. (2024). How Aligned are Human Chart Takeaways and LLM Predictions? A Case Study on Bar Charts with Varying Layouts. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE VIS 2024. 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456378