CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Marti Hearst
Berkeley
Show It or Tell It? Text, Visualization, and their Combination
March 13, 2026

In this talk, Professor Marti Hearst will share observations about the role of language in information visualization, posing questions such as: how do we decide what to express via language vs via visualization? How do we choose what kind of text to use when creating visualizations, and does that choice matter? Does anyone prefer text over visuals, under what circumstances, and why? And how do multimodal large language models figure into this?

Marti Hearst a Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Computer Science Division. She was Interim Dean and Head of School for the I School from 2022-2024. Her current research encompasses information visualization with a focus on text, and information spread in the current media ecosystem. She is the author of Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on that topic. She is a former President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a member of the CHI Academy and the SIGIR Academy, an ACM Fellow, an ACL Fellow, and has received four Excellence in Teaching Awards from the students of UC Berkeley. She received her PhD, MS, and BA degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC.