Yong Wang Turns Views into Ideas

“Visualization helps people understand complex ideas,” Wang said. “If we design these tools right, they can make advanced technology accessible to everyone.”

For his work in this field, the IEEE Computer Society’s committee on visualization and graphics awarded him the 2025 Outstanding Young Researcher Award. The recognition highlights his growing influence in fields including human-computer interaction and human-AI interaction—areas becoming increasingly important as the world produces more data than humans can easily interpret.

He grows up in the countryside of Hunan

Wang was born in the southwest of Hunan Province. China’s economy was still developing, and life in his hometown was low. Many families in Hunan grew rice, vegetables and fruits for a living.

Wang’s parents also worked in agriculture, and his father often went to the cities to earn money working in factories or construction jobs. The extra money helped support the family and enabled Wang to attend college.

“I am very grateful to my parents,” said Wang. “They never went to university, but they are very supportive of my education.”

“If we build tools that help people understand information, more people can participate in science and innovation. That’s the real power of visualization.”

Technology was scarce in the area, he says. Computers were almost non-existent, and televisions were considered a valuable and expensive household item.

Another childhood memory still makes him laugh: During summer vacation, he and his brother spent so many hours playing video games on a simple console connected to the family television that the TV screen burned out.

“My mother was very angry,” he remembers. At that time, TV was the most important thing.

He says that although he has never used a laptop or tried electronics, he became interested in the technology he saw on television.

Discovering robotics and engineering

His parents encouraged a practical career such as medicine or civil engineering, but he felt drawn to robots and computers, he says.

“I didn’t really understand what computer science was all about,” he says. “But from what I saw on TV, it looked exciting and advanced.”

He enrolled at the Harbin Institute of Technology, in northeastern China. The prestigious university is known for its engineering programs. His major items—automation—combined elements of electrical engineering, robotics, and control systems.

Another defining feature of his undergraduate years, he says, was the university’s robotics competition. Wang and his teammates designed a robot that can navigate around obstacles.

The design was simple compared to the technical systems, he admits. But he says, the experience was fun. His team placed second, and Wang began to see engineering as both creative and collaborative.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 2011 and briefly worked as an assistant at the Research Institute of Intelligent Control and Systems in Harbin.

In 2014 he took a research position working at Da Jiang Innovation in Shenzhen, China.

That experience helped him clarify his future, he says: “I realized that I didn’t enjoy doing repetitive work or simply following instructions. He said this realization forced him to graduate school.

Building tools that help people work with AI

Wang received a master’s degree in pattern recognition and image processing from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2016.

He then enrolled in a computer science Ph.D. program at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and graduated in 2018. He stayed there as a postdoctoral researcher until 2020, when he moved to Singapore to join the Singapore Management University as an assistant professor of computer systems and information. He moved to Nanyang Technological University as an assistant professor in 2024.

His research focuses on a challenge facing almost all businesses: how to make sense of the large amounts of data being generated.

“We live in an age of information explosion,” said Wang. “Huge amounts of data are being generated, and it’s difficult for people to interpret it all to make better business decisions.”

Data visualization provides a solution by turning complex information into images, patterns, and diagrams that people can easily understand.

But many visualizations still have to be designed by hand by experts, Wang notes. It’s a time-consuming process that creates a bottleneck, he says.

His solution is to use large language models and multimodal systems that can generate text, images, video, and sensor data simultaneously and automate parts of the process.

One system developed by his research group allows users to design complex infographics using natural language instructions combined with simple interactions such as drawing on a touchscreen with a finger. It allows non-technical people to produce visuals instead of hiring professional designers.

Another focus of Wang’s research is human interaction with AI. AI systems can analyze data on a large scale, but humans still need to be the decision makers, he says.

Visualization helps bridge the gap between human intent and complex AI calculations by making the process the AI ​​system uses to achieve a clear and understandable result.

“If people understand how an AI system works,” Wang said, “they can interact with it more effectively.”

He recently explored how visualization techniques can help researchers understand quantum computing, a field where core concepts—such as superposition, where a bit can be in more than one state at a time—are abstract. In a primitive computer, a bit state is binary: Either 1 or 0. A quantum bit, or qubit, can be 1, 0, or both. The difference gets more confusing from there.

Visualization tools can help scientists monitor quantum systems and interpret quantum machine learning models, he says.

The importance of IEEE communities

Teaching and mentoring students remain among the most important parts of Wang’s work, he says.

He says professional societies, such as the IEEE Computer Society, play a big role in helping him turn undergraduates who don’t know what questions to pursue into independent researchers focused on technology. Through conferences, publications, and technical committees, IEEE connects Wang with other researchers working on vision, AI, and human-computer interaction, he says.

Those connections have helped him share ideas, collaborate, and stay up-to-date on new developments in the research community.

Receiving the Outstanding Young Researcher award encourages him to continue pushing the field forward, he says.

Looking back, he says, the distance between his hometown in Hunan and international research still seems staggering. But, he says, the trip shows something bigger about his chosen field: “If we build tools that help people understand information, more people can participate in science and innovation.”

“That’s the real power of visualization.”