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Dominik Moritz
Voyager Paper Earns InfoVis Test of Time Award
Moritz and collaborators recognized with 10-year impact award at IEEE VIS 2025
Photo credit: Pattharin Deariz Ongartitthichai
A foundational research paper that changed how people explore data has been recognized for its long-term impact, a decade after its publication.
The paper, “Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations,” received the 10-year InfoVis Test of Time Award at the IEEE VIS 2025 conference on November 4. This award recognizes work that has had a major influence both within and beyond the visualization community.
Dominik Moritz, now an assistant professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), is one of the authors of the Voyager paper.
The collaboration came together while Moritz and Kanit (Ham) Wongsuphasawat were Computer Science and Engineering Ph.D. students at the University of Washington. The work continued for a few years with co-authors Anushka Anand and Jock D. Mackinlay from Tableau Research and Bill Howe and Jeffrey Heer of UW.
The paper earned its influence by addressing a common, frustrating problem: getting started with a new, unfamiliar data set.
Exploring new data is a manual task, and it’s easy to get bogged down in the early stages. Making decisions about which data to use, how to chart it, and even identifying the goal of the analysis before you’ve analyzed anything, can feel overwhelming.
Voyager was built to improve this. Instead of having the analyst build every chart by hand, the tool complements manual work with an automatically-generated gallery of visualizations, right from the start.
“Instead of starting with a blank screen, the analyst immediately gets a gallery of charts that they can browse to get an overview of their data," said Moritz. “Voyager encourages analysts to follow best practices in visual analysis and explore the breadth of their data before diving into specific questions. Voyager is not only a useful tool, but we designed it to make people better analysts.”
The Voyager tool prioritized broad exploration by showing charts with different data, rather than providing 10 different ways to display the same data. Participants in the original study valued this variety and noted that seeing visuals they would not have considered on their own prompted them to explore the data more deeply with another tool later.
According to the IEEE VIS Test of Time Awards page, the Voyager paper is a “major landmark” that helped shift the field from human-led visualization to a "mixed-initiative approach" – one where the computer provides smart recommendations to help the human analyst. “With the advancement of AI, the mixed-initiative approach is even more relevant today.”
In the paper's Discussion and Future Work section, the authors viewed Voyager as a first step towards improved systems that balance automation and manual specification.
“A newer version, Voyager 2, combines the best of Voyager’s visualization browsing and Polestar/Tableau’s visualization specification into one system. It is live on GitHub for people to try,” Moritz said.
Although most research paper awards recognize excellence at the time of publication, a Test of Time Award is a true celebration of a paper’s foundational influence and long-term impact.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Visualization & Visual Analytics (VIS) conference, held November 2-7, 2025, in Vienna, Austria, is the premier forum for advances in visualization and visual analytics.
Photo credit: Johannes Eschner
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