Alex Yang

Spatial Computing + HCI

My research explores how spatial computing techniques, grounded in HCI principles, can reshape the way we analyze and interpret multi-dimensional data. I focus on designing immersive visualizations and cross-reality systems that bridge the physical and virtual worlds, enabling more intuitive, interactive, and collaborative approaches to data exploration.

Education

Aug. 2024 — Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Advisor: Yalong Yang, Co-advisor: Polo Chau
Aug. 2022 — May 2023
M.S. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Specialization: Computational Perception and Robotics
Advisor: Polo Chau, Co-advisor: Thad Starner
Aug. 2019 — May 2022
B.S. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Concentration: Intelligence and Devices
Highest Honor, GPA: 4.00/4.00, Minor in Japanese

Research Experience

Aug. 2024 — Present
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Graduate Research Assistant, School of Interactive Computing
Advisor: Yalong Yang, Polo Chau
Member of the IVI Lab and Polo Club of Data Science in Georgia Tech’s Visualization Lab, where we innovate at the intersection of data visualization, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.
Aug. 2022 — May 2023
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Graduate Research Assistant, School of Computational Science and Engineering
Advisor: Polo Chau, Thad Starner
Researched and developed interactive visualization systems and AI-driven data exploration frameworks for literature analysis, generative model curation, and ambient intelligence.
Sept. 2020 — May 2022
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Undergraduate Research Assistant, School of Computational Science and Engineering
Advisor: Polo Chau
Investigated immersive and web-based visualization techniques through the development of an AR platform for surgical planning and a web-based system facilitating interactive graph analytics learning.

Industry Experience

June 2023 — July 2024
Goldman Sachs, Dallas, TX
Software Engineer, Private Wealth Management
Mentor: Japen Pathak
Designed, developed, and maintained scalable platforms for client portfolio management and data-driven financial analytics.
June 2022 — Aug. 2022
Goldman Sachs, Dallas, TX
Software Engineering Summer Analyst, Consumer and Wealth Management
Designed and delivered a real-time trading interface that streamlined trade monitoring and notifications. Collaborated with design and mobile teams to create a cohesive user experience across platforms.

Awards and Honors

2023
Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention at ACL Conference
For "DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models"
2023
Donald V. Jackson Fellowship Award
Selected to represent the School of Computational Science and Engineering as the outstanding first-year Master’s student at Georgia Tech
2021
Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention at IEEE VIS Conference
For "Argo Scholar: Interactive Visual Exploration of Literature in Browsers"

Publications

Journal

LitForager: Exploring Multimodal Literature Foraging Strategies in Immersive Sensemaking
Alex Yang, Elliott Faa, Weijian Liu, Shunan Guo, Polo Chau, Yalong Yang
Special Issue on IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), Daejeon, South Korea, 2025.
PDF Code Preview Video BibTeX DOI TVCG Track (top 8%)

Conference

Diffusion Explainer: Visual Explanation for Text-to-image Stable Diffusion
Seongmin Lee, Benjamin Hoover, Hendrik Strobelt, Zijie J. Wang, Anthony Peng, Austin Wright, Kevin Li, Haekyu Park, Alex Yang, Polo Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 2024.
PDF Demo Code Blog Video Poster BibTeX DOI
Multi-User Mobile Augmented Reality for Cardiovascular Surgical Planning
Pratham Mehta, Rahul O. Narayanan, Harsha Dinesh Karanth, Alex Yang, Timothy C. Slesnick, Fawwaz Shaw, Polo Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 2024.
PDF Code BibTeX DOI
DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models
Zijie J. Wang, Evan Montoya, David Munechika, Alex Yang, Benjamin Hoover, Polo Chau
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Toronto, Canada, 2023.
PDF Demo Code Dataset BibTeX DOI Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention Trending on Hugging Face

Workshop

3D Gaussian Splat Vulnerabilities
Matthew Hull, Alex Yang, Pratham Mehta, Mansi Phute, Aeree Cho, Haoran Wang, Matthew Lau, Wenke Lee, Willian Lunardi, Martin Andreoni, Polo Chau
Workshop on Neural Fields Beyond Conventional Cameras
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Nashville, TN, USA, 2025.
PDF Code Video Poster BibTeX arXiv
Symbiotic Artificial Intelligence: Order Picking and Ambient Sensing
Zhe Ming Chng, Calix Tang, Darshan Krishnaswamy, Alex Yang, Shivang Chopra, Jon Womack, Thad Starner
Workshop on Ambient AI Multimodal Wearable Sensor Understanding
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Rhodes Island, Greece, 2023.
PDF Code BibTeX DOI

Poster

Break the Window: Exploring Spatial Decomposition of Webpages in XR
Chenyang Zhang, Tianjian Wei, Alex Yang, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Yalong Yang, Eric J. Gonzalez
Poster, Extended Abstracts on ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Barcelona, Spain, 2026.
PDF Demo Code BibTeX DOI
ARCollab: Towards Multi-User Interactive Cardiovascular Surgical Planning in Mobile Augmented Reality
Pratham Mehta, Harsha Dinesh Karanth, Alex Yang, Timothy C. Slesnick, Fawwaz Shaw, Polo Chau
Late-Breaking Work, Extended Abstracts on ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Honolulu, HI, USA, 2024.
PDF Code Poster BibTeX DOI
Evaluating Cardiovascular Surgical Planning in Mobile Augmented Reality
Alex Yang, Pratham Mehta, Jonathan Leo, Zhiyan Zhou, Megan Dass, Anish Upadhayay, Timothy C. Slesnick, Fawwaz Shaw, Amanda Randles, Polo Chau
Poster, IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 2022.
PDF Code Video Poster BibTeX arXiv
Evaluation of Argo Scholar with Observational Study
Kevin Li, Alex Yang, Evan Montoya, Anish Upadhayay, Zhiyan Zhou, Jon Saad-Falcon, Polo Chau
Poster, IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 2022.
PDF Demo Code Video Poster BibTeX arXiv
Argo Scholar: Interactive Visual Exploration of Literature in Browsers
Kevin Li, Alex Yang, Anish Upadhayay, Zhiyan Zhou, Jon Saad-Falcon, Polo Chau
Poster, IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), Virtual, 2021.
PDF Demo Code Video Poster BibTeX arXiv Best Poster Award, Honorable Mention
Interactive Cardiovascular Surgical Planning via Augmented Reality
Jonathan Leo, Zhiyan Zhou, Alex Yang, Megan Dass, Anish Upadhayay, Timothy C. Slesnick, Fawwaz Shaw, Polo Chau
Poster, Asian Conference on Computer Human Interaction (Asian CHI), Virtual, 2021.
PDF Code Video BibTeX DOI

Demo

Interactive Visual Learning for Stable Diffusion
Seongmin Lee, Benjamin Hoover, Hendrik Strobelt, Zijie J. Wang, Anthony Peng, Austin Wright, Kevin Li, Haekyu Park, Alex Yang, Polo Chau
Demo, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Jeju, South Korea, 2024.
PDF Demo Code BibTeX DOI
Visual Exploration of Literature with Argo Scholar
Kevin Li, Alex Yang, Evan Montoya, Anish Upadhayay, Zhiyan Zhou, Jon Saad-Falcon, Polo Chau
Demo, ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2022.
PDF Demo Code Poster BibTeX DOI

Preprint

ComplicitSplat: Downstream Models are Vulnerable to Blackbox Attacks by 3D Gaussian Splat Camouflages
Matthew Hull, Alex Yang, Pratham Mehta, Mansi Phute, Aeree Cho, Haoran Wang, Matthew Lau, Wenke Lee, Willian Lunardi, Martin Andreoni, Polo Chau
arXiv, 2025.
PDF Code BibTeX arXiv

Teaching

Summer 2026
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Computer Graphics in the AI Era (CS 8803), Instructor: Bo Zhu
Head TA. Coordinated the TA team, managed course logistics and student communications, supported assignment and grading workflows, and helped students through office hours and course forums.
Fall 2022 — Spr. 2023
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Data and Visual Analytics (CSE 6242), Instructor: Polo Chau
Developed and deployed Argo Lite and Argo Scholar as teaching tools, held weekly office hours, and mentored student team projects for a Georgia Tech OMSCS course with over 2,000 students enrolled.

Mentoring

Fall 2025 — Present
Tianjian Wei
B.S. in Computational Media, Georgia Institute of Technology
Spatial decomposition of web content in XR
Fall 2025 — Spr. 2026
Lily Chisholm
B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Cross-reality collaboration in immersive analytics
Spr. 2025 — Present
Elliott Faa
B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Spatial interaction and immersive visualization methods
Spr. 2025 — Spr. 2026
Weijian Liu
M.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
User-centered design and qualitative analysis of immersive systems
Fall 2021 — Spr. 2025
Pratham Mehta
B.S./M.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
AR visualization techniques for cardiac surgical planning
Donald V. Jackson Fellowship Award, Spr. 2025
Now: Software Engineer at Figma
Fall 2021 — Spr. 2022
Evan Montoya
B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Interactive graph visualization design
Stamps President's Scholar
Now: Quantitative Researcher at Mariner Investment

Service

Reviewer
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026
Workshop on Security, Privacy, and Adversarial Robustness in 3D Generative Vision Models (SPAR-3D) at CVPR 2026
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2026
IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) 2026
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) 2025
ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) 2025
Workshop on Visualization for AI Explainability (VISxAI) at IEEE VIS 2025
Institutional
Billiards @ Georgia Tech, Co-founder & Vice President, 2019 - 2020
Member
2021 — Present
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2021 — Present
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

References

Dr. Yalong Yang, Assistant Professor
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Polo Chau, Professor
School of Computational Science and Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Thad Starner, Professor
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology