Research

I have published research papers about explainable artificial intelligence, visual analytics, and gamification at international conferences and in scientific journals. Filter on your favourite topics with the buttons below.

UpGrade

Screenshot of the UpGrade interface with multiple visualisations of grade distributions

A laptop, thesis, and assessment form

This interactive visual analytics dashboard aims to help lecturers reflect on their grading practices. It visualises grade distributions and rubric scores, and applies topic modelling on open feedback.

LAK 2026: "Detect, Explain, Act: How Teachers Trust and Use an Explainable Real-Time Monitoring Dashboard to Detect Student Outliers in Class"

Visual Analytics

Dashboard

This paper is an outcome of the master's thesis I guided by Anissa Faik. We created a dashboard for teachers to monitor students' performance on a learning platform in real-time. We studied how explanations influence teachers' trust in an algorithm that detects outlier students.

BlendEd

A screenshot of the Design view in the BlendEd planner tool

Supported by technological advances, universities increasingly embrace blended learning. This means students engage with content both inside and outside traditional classrooms, working synchronously and asynchronously, individually and collaboratively.

AIED 2024: "Nudging Adolescents Towards Recommended Maths Exercises With Gameful Rewards"

Selection interface in Alchemath

First page of the AIED 2024 paper

Title slide of our presentation

This paper is an outcome of the master's thesis by Joran De Braekeleer, which I guided and Katrien Verbert supervised. We studied how gamification can be used to nudge adolescents towards recommended exercises on a mobile app for practising math equations.

PhD thesis: "Explaining Artificial Intelligence With Tailored Interactive Visualisations"

Visual Analytics

Cover of the thesis showing a black cube

Diagram of 6 screenshots of visualisation-based explanations

Diagram of 6 screenshots of visualisation-based explanations, classified as "visual analytics", "justification", and "control".

My PhD thesis focuses on human-centred explainable AI and presents 5 studies on how explainability can be established through visual analytics, visualisation-supported justification, and visualisation-supported control.

IUI 2023: "Steering Recommendations and Visualising Its Impact: Effects on Adolescents’ Trust in E-Learning Platforms"

Visualisation of changes in mastery level

First page of the IUI 2023 paper

Slider to steer the difficulty of exercises

My paper with Leen Dereu for the IUI 2023 conference. It is based on Leen's master's thesis on a steering mechanism for recommended exercises. We studied how a control mechanism and a visualisation that depicts the control's impact affected adolescents' trust in a platform that recommends mathematics exercises.

Agriculture 2022: "Visually Explaining Uncertain Price Predictions in Agrifood: A User-Centred Case-Study"

Visual Analytics

Screenshot of our responsive visual DSS during interaction: selecting a food product in the upper left search field and getting details about the price and date upon hovering over the line chart

First page Agriculture 2022 paper

Summary of the themes on usability, usefulness and needs, model understanding, and trust

My journal paper for Agriculture presents a prototypical visual decision support system that incorporates price prediction, uncertainty, and visual analytics techniques. Interviews and questionnaires suggest that user-centred approaches are key for increasing the uptake of visual decision support systems in agrifood.

IUI 2022: "Explaining Recommendations in E-Learning: Effects on Adolescents' Trust"

Visual explanation for a recommended exercise

First page of the IUI 2022 paper

IUI 2022

My work with Shotallo Kato for the IUI 2022 conference, based on Shotallo's master's thesis. We studied the impact of explanations on adolescents' trust in a platform that recommends maths exercises.

WIREs 2021: "Explaining artificial intelligence with visual analytics in healthcare"

Visual Analytics

Diagram of how visual analytics can explain AI in healthcare

First page of WIREs 2021 paper

Examples of shepherding, ordered by the level of integration in the visual analytics system

My advanced review for WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. It presents current approaches in healthcare for explaining artificial intelligence algorithms with visual analytics.

TREX 2021: "Trust in Prediction Models: a Mixed-Methods Pilot Study on the Impact of Domain Expertise"

Visual Analytics

First page of TREX 2021 paper

First slide of TREX 2021 presentation

My paper for the TREX workshop at the IEEE VIS 2021 conference. It is about how domain expertise influences people's trust in prediction models.

Practicing the right math: Enhancing trust in an e-learning platform using an explainable recommender system

Explanation for a recommendation

Practice page on Shotallo's Wiski

List of exercises with personalised difficulty levels

A summary of Shotallo Kato's master's thesis, which I guided. The research focused on how explanations for recommended exercises affect adolescents' trust in a mathematics educational platform.

Uncertainty-aware price prediction: Trust and understandability

Visual Analytics

Fan charts for butter in France and Greece

Screenshot of the website announcing the webinar

Fan charts for chaddar in Ireland, Sweden, and the UK

Summary of my contribution to the EU BigDataGrapes project. I created a dashboard that visualises product prices, predicted prices, and uncertainty in the predictions.

CHI PLAY 2020: "Tailoring Gamification for Adolescents: a Validation Study of Big Five and Hexad in Dutch"

Tailoring gamification based on models and instruments

First page of the CHI PLAY 2020 paper

Picture of Ottawa, Canada

My first published paper, presented at the CHI PLAY 2020 conference. The analysis is based on the data that I collected for my Applied Informatics master's thesis.

Master's thesis: "Personalising motivational strategies and gamification techniques with recommender systems"

Practise page on Wiski

In my Applied Informatics master's thesis, I studied the impact of tailored gamification in the scope of mathematical education. This article summarises my research.