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 innovating Immersive Visualization frameworks and designing systems for Cross-Reality Collaboration, enabling more intuitive and interactive data exploration across physical, virtual, and hybrid environments.

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
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) Special Issue
IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), Daejeon, South Korea, 2025.
PDF Project Code Preview Video BibTeX 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), Virtual, 2024.
PDF Project Code Blog Video Poster BibTeX
ARCollab: Towards Multi-User Interactive Cardiovascular Surgical Planning in Mobile Augmented Reality
Pratham Darrpan Mehta, Harsha Dinesh Karanth, Alex Yang, Timothy C. Slesnick, Fawwaz Shaw, Polo Chau
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Honolulu, HI, USA, 2024.
PDF Project Code BibTeX
Multi-User Mobile Augmented Reality for Cardiovascular Surgical Planning
Pratham Darrpan Mehta, Rahul O. Narayanan, Harsha Dinesh Karanth, Alex Yang, Timothy C. Slesnick, Fawwaz Shaw, Polo Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), Virtual, 2024.
PDF Project Code BibTeX
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 Project Code Dataset BibTeX Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention Trending on Hugging Face ( 2M+)

Workshop

3D Gaussian Splat Vulnerabilities
Matthew Hull, Alex Yang, Pratham Darrpan 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 Project Code Video Poster BibTeX
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 Project Code BibTeX

Poster

Evaluating Cardiovascular Surgical Planning in Mobile Augmented Reality
Alex Yang, Pratham Darrpan Mehta, Jonathan Leo, Zhiyan Zhou, Megan Dass, Anish Upadhayay, Timothy C. Slesnick, Fawwaz Shaw, Amanda Randles, Polo Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 2022.
PDF Project Code Video Poster BibTeX
Evaluation of Argo Scholar with Observational Study
Kevin Li, Alex Yang, Evan Montoya, Anish Upadhayay, Zhiyan Zhou, Jon Saad-Falcon, Polo Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 2022.
PDF Project Code Video Poster BibTeX
Argo Scholar: Interactive Visual Exploration of Literature in Browsers
Kevin Li, Alex Yang, Anish Upadhayay, Zhiyan Zhou, Jon Saad-Falcon, Polo Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), Virtual, 2021.
PDF Project Code Video Poster BibTeX 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
Asian Conference on Computer Human Interaction (Asian CHI), Virtual, 2021.
PDF Project Code Video BibTeX

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
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Jeju, South Korea, 2024.
PDF Project Code Video BibTeX
Visual Exploration of Literature with Argo Scholar
Kevin Li, Alex Yang, Evan Montoya, Anish Upadhayay, Zhiyan Zhou, Jon Saad-Falcon, Polo Chau
ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2022.
PDF Project Code Video Poster BibTeX

Preprint

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

Teaching

Fall 2022 — Spring 2023
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Data and Visual Analytics (CSE 6242 / CX 4242), Instructor: Polo Chau
Designed and developed teaching tools, held weekly office hours, and mentored student team projects for Data and Visual Analytics (CSE 6242 / CX 4242), a graduate course with over 2,000 students enrolled.

Mentoring

Fall 2025— Present
Lily Chisholm
B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Cross-reality collaboration in immersive analytics
Spring 2025— Present
Elliott Faa
B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Spatial interaction and immersive visualization methods
Spring 2025— Present
Weijian Liu
M.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
User-centered design and qualitative analysis of immersive systems
Fall 2021 — Spring 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, Spring 2025
Now: Software Engineer at Figma
Fall 2021 — Spring 2022
Evan Montoya
B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Interactive graph visualization design
Stamps President's Scholar
Now: Research Intern at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Service

Reviewer
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