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2026 IEEE Pacific Visualization Service Award: Kwan-Liu Ma

The 2026 IEEE Pacific Visualization (PacificVis) Service Award is presented to Kwan-Liu Ma in recognition of his sustained and critical service contributions to the founding, long-term governance, and international development of PacificVis.

Professor Ma served as the Founding Chair of PacificVis and chaired the PacificVis Steering Committee from 2008 to 2025, providing long-term continuity and strong institutional leadership. In 2008, he initiated and organized the inaugural IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium in Kyoto, Japan, where he also served as the first Papers Chair, establishing a rigorous peer-review process and a quality-first scholarly standard that continues to shape the conference.

Under his leadership, PacificVis established a stable, long-term publication partnership with IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), enabling conference papers to be published in a premier international journal venue. This arrangement significantly increased the visibility and recognition of PacificVis within both the Asia–Pacific academic evaluation system and the global visualization community, supporting its growth into a major international conference alongside IEEE VIS and EuroVis.

Over his 17-year tenure (2008–2025) as Chair of the Steering Committee, Professor Ma led the establishment and implementation of a geographic rotation policy, enabling PacificVis to be hosted across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and Thailand. This policy systematically expanded the scope and inclusiveness of the “Pacific” region and strengthened the conference’s international presence.

Professor Ma’s service has consistently emphasized capacity building within the Asia–Pacific region. Through sustained mentorship and leadership, he has promoted the participation and professional advancement of Asia–Pacific researchers in international visualization venues. Many individuals influenced by these efforts now serve in leadership roles as program committee members, organizers, and steering committee participants for IEEE VIS and PacificVis.

In 2024, under Professor Ma’s long-term stewardship, PacificVis was formally elevated to the IEEE Pacific Visualization Conference, marking its successful transition from a regional symposium to a mature international conference. In recognition of his sustained service in founding, governing, and internationalizing PacificVis, as well as his long-standing contributions to the Asia–Pacific visualization community, the IEEE Pacific Visualization Service Award Committee is honored to present the 2026 IEEE Pacific Visualization Service Award to Kwan-Liu Ma.

Wei Chen, Seok-Hee Hong, Takayuki Itoh

The 2026 IEEE PacificVis Early Career Award

Award Committee

Selection Process

To select the winner of this year's IEEE PacificVis Early Career Award, we first issued a call for nominations through major mailing lists and social media and then collected submissions via a formal Google Form. The award committee, consisting of Issei Fujishiro, Jinwook Seo, and Xiaoru Yuan, independently evaluated each nominee based on their recent research impact and history of service or publication with PacificVis. Following these individual reviews, the committee convened via Zoom for a thorough discussion to compare findings and ensure a fair assessment. Due to a conflict of interest, Committee Chair Kwan-Liu Ma recused himself from the actual selection process to maintain the highest ethical standards. Ultimately, the committee reached a unanimous agreement in selecting two recipients this year, whose individual accomplishments perfectly reflect the excellence this award seeks to honor.

Dr. Takanori Fujiwara (Assistant Professor, University of Arizona, USA)

Dr. Fujiwara has made foundational contributions to contrastive and comparative visual analytics, leveraging dimensionality reduction and representation learning to illuminate the structure and meaning of high-dimensional and network data. His scholarly achievements are exceptional for an early-career researcher. He has authored more than fifty publications (h-index 16, 856 citations according to Google Scholar as of March 17, 2026), including twenty-four articles in top-tier journals. Within PacificVis, he has co-authored six full papers and one short paper in the main proceedings, as well as four full papers and one short paper in PacificVis-related workshops. His research excellence has been recognized through multiple awards, including Best Paper Honorable Mentions at IEEE VIS 2019 and 2023, a Best Paper Honorable Mention at PacificVis 2022, and an Honorable Mention in the PacificVis 2018 Visual Storytelling Contest. Dr. Fujiwara has also demonstrated exemplary service to the PacificVis community. In particular, his sustained leadership as co-chair of the Visualization Meets AI Workshop series (2021–2026) has played a vital role in strengthening the bridge between visualization and artificial intelligence.

This award recognizes not only his outstanding research contributions but also the clarity of his long-term vision and his dedication to community building. His work exemplifies the mission of PacificVis by empowering deeper human understanding of complex data through innovative visual analytics.

For his transformative research impact, exemplary service, and leadership in advancing the field, Dr. Takanori Fujiwara is honored with the IEEE PacificVis Early Career Award.

Dr. Junpeng Wang (VISA Research, USA)

Dr. Wang's primary research lies at the intersection of Explainable AI (XAI), Visual Analytics, and Deep Learning. His work focuses on developing interactive visualization techniques to interpret, diagnose, and enhance the trustworthiness of complex AI and machine learning models, with applications ranging from foundational models to financial risk modeling. His dissertation established a visual analytics framework for deep learning interpretation, followed by a series of highly regarded publications, winning multiple awards, including the IEEE PacificVis Best Paper Award in 2018, IEEE VAST 2018 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, IEEE SciVis Best Paper Award in 2019, IEEE PacificVis Best Notes Award in 2023, and IEEE PacificVis Best Paper Honorable Mention Award in 2023. In service to the research community, Junpeng Wang has demonstrated sustained leadership and engagement, particularly with IEEE Pacific Visualization. He has served continuously as chair of the Vis Meets AI workshop at PacificVis from 2022 through 2025 and is scheduled to chair it again in 2026, playing a central role in fostering dialogue between the visualization and artificial intelligence communities at the conference.

He has also been a regular program committee member for PacificVis across multiple years. Beyond PacificVis, he has served in organizing roles at IEEE VIS, EuroVis, ChinaVis, and other venues.

For his pioneering research in visual analytics and his dedicated service to the community, particularly at PacificVis, Dr. Junpeng Wang is honored with the IEEE PacificVis Early Career Award.