Ph.D. Graduate Follows Footsteps of Advisor in Receiving Dissertation Award
When Arpit Narechania received the 2025 IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (VGTC) Doctoral Dissertation Award, he also earned a unique distinction for himself and his faculty advisor, Alex Endert.
Narechania and Endert are the first advisee-advisor pair to win the VGTC award, one of the highest honors in data visualization research.
Narechania earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 2024 and received the 2025 award for his dissertation, Designing, Developing, and Democratizing Guidance for Visual Analytics.
Endert, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, won the same award 12 years earlier as a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech.
Throughout his Ph.D. research, Narechania held fast to the belief that human decisions are best guided by data. Better data tools lead to better decision-making. He also argued that human analytic behavior can itself become data, enabling humans to better understand their own reasoning and systems.
This perspective informed numerous data tools Narechania created as a GT Ph.D. student, as well as his dissertation, which reflected the core idea that the design of these tools should produce robust guidance systems.
“We need to think about how a system can adaptively guide both new users of a tool as well as experts who know how to use it, but there still might be ways to help them perform more efficiently,” Narechania said.
Narechania began his Ph.D. in 2019, working under Endert.
“I had no prior research experience before Georgia Tech, so I’m grateful Dr. Endert took a chance on me,” Narechania said. “As a Ph.D. student, you go through a lot of ups and downs. Winning this award felt rewarding and made it all worth it.”
One of the early tools he designed, Lumos, laid the foundation for his Ph.D. research. The tool helps bank loan officers, college administrators, hiring managers, and other users become more aware of their behavior and alerts them to potential bias in their selection processes.
“You can tell Lumos specific attributes that you want to hit in your selection process to prevent bias in the application process,” he said. “If you start getting too fixed on one attribute, let’s say gender, the tool will flag that and increase your awareness that some attributes are being favored over others. You’re probably not reaching your goal of unbiased decision making.”
Narechania is an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he continues to apply visual analytics and human-computer interaction to develop improved guidance systems.
Endert won the award in 2013 for his dissertation Semantic Interaction for Visual Analytics: Inferring Analytical Reasoning for Model Steering.
“I was incredibly honored that senior members of the visualization community shared my excitement for the work,” Endert said.
“Dissertations take years, and are often punctuated by rejections, failures, late nights, and a myriad of other challenges along the way. Awards like this are moments to celebrate the accomplishments of a large body of work and reflect on the journey to get there.
“This award is also a wonderful recognition of years of incredible research from Arpit,” Endert added. “It speaks to the intellectual contribution of the work and the impact it has had. It is very well deserved.”
