Leo Yu‐Ho Lo

Po-Ming Law, Leo Yu-Ho Lo, Alex Endert et al.

Root cause analysis is a common data analysis task. While question-answering systems enable people to easily articulate a why question (e.g., why students in Massachusetts have high ACT Math scores on average) and obtain an answer, these systems often produce questionable causal claims. To investigate how such claims might mislead users, we conducted two crowdsourced experiments to study the impact of showing different information on user perceptions of a question-answering system. We found that in a system that occasionally provided unreasonable responses, showing a scatterplot increased the plausibility of unreasonable causal claims. Also, simply warning participants that correlation is not causation seemed to lead participants to accept reasonable causal claims more cautiously. We observed a strong tendency among participants to associate correlation with causation. Yet, the warning appeared to reduce the tendency. Grounded in the findings, we propose ways to reduce the illusion of causality when using question-answering systems.

Xumeng Chen, Leo Yu-Ho Lo, Huamin Qu

News articles tend to be increasingly misleading nowadays, preventing readers from making subjective judgments towards certain events. While some machine learning approaches have been proposed to detect misleading news, most of them are black boxes that provide limited help for humans in decision making. In this paper, we present SirenLess, a visual analytical system for misleading news detection by linguistic features. The system features article explorer, a novel interactive tool that integrates news metadata and linguistic features to reveal semantic structures of news articles and facilitate textual analysis. We use SirenLess to analyze 18 news articles from different sources and summarize some helpful patterns for misleading news detection. A user study with journalism professionals and university students is conducted to confirm the usefulness and effectiveness of our system.

Meng Xia, Huan Wei, Min Xu et al.

With increasing popularity in online learning, a surge of E-learning platforms have emerged to facilitate education opportunities for k-12 (from kindergarten to 12th grade) students and with this, a wealth of information on their learning logs are getting recorded. However, it remains unclear how to make use of these detailed learning behavior data to improve the design of learning materials and gain deeper insight into students' thinking and learning styles. In this work, we propose a visual analytics system to analyze student learning behaviors on a K-12 mathematics E-learning platform. It supports both correlation analysis between different attributes and a detailed visualization of user mouse-movement logs. Our case studies on a real dataset show that our system can better guide the design of learning resources (e.g., math questions) and facilitate quick interpretation of students' problem-solving and learning styles.

Leo Yu-Ho Lo, Yao Ming, Huamin Qu

Teaching and advocating data visualization are among the most important activities in the visualization community. With growing interest in data analysis from business and science professionals, data visualization courses attract students across different disciplines. However, comprehensive visualization training requires students to have a certain level of proficiency in programming, a requirement that imposes challenges on both teachers and students. With recent developments in visualization tools, we have managed to overcome these obstacles by teaching a wide range of visualization and supporting tools. Starting with GUI-based visualization tools and data analysis with Python, students put visualization knowledge into practice with increasing amounts of programming. At the end of the course, students can design and implement visualizations with D3 and other programming-based visualization tools. Throughout the course, we continuously collect student feedback and refine the teaching materials. This paper documents our teaching methods and considerations when designing the teaching materials.