The VIS 2026 capstone talk will be given by Nils Gehlenborg.
The Eyes Still Have It: Do They?
Abstract: In 1996, Ben Shneiderman argued that “the eyes have it”. Thirty years later, most of the data generated in biology and medicine will never be seen in full by a person. Spatial, multimodal tissue atlases are enabling virtual cell models, foundation models are learning from increasingly complex biomedical datasets, and AI systems are beginning to conduct scientific analyses autonomously. It would be easy to conclude that the eyes have handed over their job. I will discuss whether this is true and what it means for the field of data visualization.
My perspective comes from 20 years of building biomedical data visualization tools for scientists, clinicians, and patients. This work has taught me that even excellent visualization methods and tools are rarely sufficient for successful visualization projects. Drawing on examples from my research, I will discuss how the success of visualization depends on factors that extend well beyond visual and interaction design, and why understanding these factors is essential for creating lasting impact in domain applications. These lessons become particularly relevant as AI changes how scientists interact with data and computational systems.
Looking ahead, AI systems will increasingly handle much of the data-intensive work in biomedical research, often autonomously. But the people who evaluate, challenge, and steer these systems, and who translate their findings into scientific and clinical decisions, will still depend on what they can see. Visualization will become less about exploring data directly and more about understanding evidence, uncertainty, and the behavior of AI systems. Designing for these interactions will remain a fundamental research challenge, and likely a harder one. I will offer a perspective on what this means for the next 30 years of visualization research and invite the community to challenge it.
About the Speaker
Nils Gehlenborg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. His research aims to improve human health by developing visual interfaces and computational techniques that let scientists and clinicians work efficiently with biomedical data. His approach tightly integrates algorithmic methods from biomedical informatics with advanced data visualization, in close collaboration with clinicians and experimentalists. He is currently developing tools to visualize 3D genome conformation data and heterogeneous data from large-scale cancer genomics studies, aiming to support both sense-making in biology and reproducible, collaborative research. He is also a Co-Investigator for the 4D Nucleome Network Data Coordination and Integration Center at Harvard Medical School.
Gehlenborg co-founded BioVis, the Symposium on Biological Data Visualization, and VIZBI, the annual workshop on Visualizing Biological Data; he previously served as BioVis general chair and now chairs its steering committee. He co-chairs the Policy Working Group for the 4D Nucleome Network, an NIH Common Fund project, has served on program committees for multiple bioinformatics and data visualization conferences, and holds editorial roles including associate editor of BMC Bioinformatics. He has also contributed to Nature Methods’ “Points of View” data visualization column.