MERCADO #2 at IEEE VIS 2025

Multimodal Experiences for Remote Communication Around Data Online

The second workshop on Multimodal Experiences for Remote Communication Around Data Online (MERCADO) will take place on the afternoon of November 2, 2025, in Vienna, Austria at IEEE VIS 2025. I will be co-organizing this event with an international team of collaborators: Wolfgang Büschel, Gabriela Molina Léon, Arnaud Prouzeau, Mahmood Jasim, Christophe Hurter, and Maxime Cordeil.

This workshop will focus on research and technologies aiming to address the main challenges of future remote communication and collaboration around data. With this workshop, our goal is to grow the community around this area of research, especially in Europe, help spawn and advance research collaborations by connecting like-minded researchers, and foster deeper international networking.

This diagram summarizes the scope of our MERCADO across four dimensions: activity, temporality, location, and modality.

Our first MERCADO workshop took place in October 2023 at IEEE VIS in Melbourne, Australia. The workshop featured six workshop paper presentations, a keynote by Tom Bartindale of Monash University, and a panel discussion. Last year, we (Maxime Cordeil, Christophe Hurter, Takayuki Itoh, and myself) continued this initiative with a 4-day seminar at the NII Shonan Village Center in Kanagawa, Japan. Twenty-seven attendees contributed their expertise and perspectives on visualization, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), immersive analytics, social XR, and application scenarios relevant to the intersection of these topics.

The in-person attendees of Shonan Meeting #213: Back row (L to R): Tim Dwyer, Zhu-Tian Chen, Christophe Hurter, Arnaud Prouzeau, Harald Reiterer, Jian Zhao, Wolfgang Büschel, Mahmood Jasim, Matthew Brehmer, Jonathan Schwabish, Maxime Cordeil, Ryo Suzuki, Andrew Cunningham, Lyn Bartram, Bongshin Lee, Brian Smith, Yasuyuki Sumi, Alark Joshi, Masahiko Itoh, Bektur Ryskeldiev, Kiyoshi Kiyokawa. Front row: Takayuki Itoh, Samuel Huron, David Saffo, Hideaki Kuzuoka, Anthony Tang, Gabriela Molina Léon.

One of the outcomes of this seminar (summarized in a report) was the identification of four categories of challenges that will motivate future research and ground the discussion at this year’s MERCADO workshop: opportunities for new tools and techniques, how individual differences and interpersonal dynamics affect synchronous and remote conversations around data, the employ of AI assistants or agents in these activities, and methodological considerations for the evaluation of MERCADO interventions.

The four main themes of challenges along which we structure our workshop.

If you have early ideas provocations to share, or if you are looking to recruit collaborators for projects related to these challenges, I invite you to submit either a short paper or an abstract by August 15th and September 15th, respectively (submission instructions are on the workshop website).