Hi! 👋 I’m Gabriela Molina León,
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Aarhus University, advised by Niklas Elmqvist. I design and implement interactive visualizations to support data exploration and sensemaking. I am interested in multimodal interaction, collaborative visual analytics, and information visualization beyond the desktop.
Recently, I obtained my PhD at the University of Bremen, under the supervision of Andreas Breiter and Petra Isenberg. In my dissertation, I investigated how different input modalities and devices can support data experts to visually explore and make sense of data, individually and collaboratively.
I received my Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Prior to that, I studied Computer Engineering at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela and at INSA Lyon in France.
Together with Moritz Stefaner and Niels Ohlsen, I co-organize the Data Visualization Bremen meetup.
You can find me on LinkedIn, BlueSky, X, and Mastodon. Or just send me an e-mail.
Featured Publications
🏆 Honorable Mention Award
Talk to the Wall: The Role of Speech Interaction in Collaborative Visual Analytics. Gabriela Molina León, Anastasia Bezerianos, Olivier Gladin, and Petra Isenberg. IEEE VIS 2024.
preprint DOI preview talk OSF GitHub GitLab replicability stamp
🏆 Best Short Paper Award
Design Frictions on Social Media: Balancing Reduced Mindless Scrolling and User Satisfaction. Nicolas Ruiz, Gabriela Molina León, and Hendrik Heuer. Mensch und Computer 2024.
Eliciting Multimodal and Collaborative Interactions for Data Exploration on Large Vertical Displays. Gabriela Molina León, Petra Isenberg, and Andreas Breiter. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Vol, 30, No. 2).
preprint DOI pdf preview talk study OSF replicability stamp
You can find all my publications on the Publications page and on Google Scholar.
Projects
Co-creating the Global Welfare State Information System
This is an interdisciplinary project to co-create an interactive web-based information system with social scientists that provides visual analysis tools to support social policy research. The project is part of the CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy.
I presented the results of our project at IC2S2 2019 in Amsterdam and at ECSCW 2022 in Coimbra.
pART bench: A Hybrid Search Tool for Floor Plans in Architecture
We designed and built a hybrid search tool that allows to look for floor plans on tablets and on tabletops, using multi-touch gestures and tangibles. The first results were presented in the ITS 2015 publication mentioned above. Our project was supported by the Women’s Promotion Fund.
Public Talks
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Multimodal and Collaborative Visual Data Exploration. Dresden Talks on Interaction & Visualization. Interactive Media Lab Dresden, Germany. January 2024.
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Eliciting Multimodal Interactions for Data Exploration on Large Vertical Displays. Journée Visu 2023. Institut de Mathématique d’Orsay, France. June 2023.
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Advanced Topics on Data Visualization. Data Science Guest lecture. University of Bremen. July 2022.
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HCI Science Slam at Math-IT-GIRLS, go! to showcase CS projects to school girls. University of Bremen. October 2020.
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Data Visualization in Python. Guest lecture. University of Bremen. June 2019.
Teaching
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Data Science and Visualization (course and tutorial for Bachelor and Master’s students). University of Bremen, summer semester 2024.
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Rebooting Social Media (Master’s Project). University of Bremen, winter semester 2023, together with Hendrik Heuer and Hannah-Marie Büttner.
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CSS4Impact: Computational Social Science for Positive Impact (Master’s Project). University of Bremen, winter semester 2022 and summer semester 2023, together with Andreas Breiter, Hannah-Marie Büttner, and Gabriella Skitalinska.
Volunteering Experience
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Equal Opportunities Committee representative at CRC 1342. University of Bremen, Germany. 2022-2024.
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Student Volunteer at CHI 2023 (in-person), EuroVis 2022 (in-person), EuroVis 2021 (virtual), IEEE VIS 2021 (virtual), and IEEE VIS 2020 (virtual).
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Web & Social Media Chair at ECSCW 2022. Coimbra, Portugal. June 2022.
Reviewing Experience
Reviewer for VIS 2024, TOCHI 2024, DIS 2024, MuC 2024, CHI 2024-2021 (incl. Special Recognition), EuroVis 2022, and CSCW 2022.