Jiajun Zhu, Xinyu Cheng, Wenshuo Zhang, Huamin Qu, Yanna Lin
Academic writing is non-linear, iterative, and structure-driven, requiring authors to develop fragmented ideas into arguments with local coherence and global consistency. However, current AI-assisted tools primarily exchange linear prompts and free-form text, forcing authors to reconstruct generated logic and repeatedly verify its alignment with their structural intentions. We propose object-oriented writing (OOW), an OOD-inspired representation and interaction paradigm in which persistent writing objects serve as shared, manipulable referents for authors and AI. We instantiate OOW in LogicTree, an Overleaf-integrated prototype that combines a hierarchical object representation with a structure-grounded writing assistance module for author-initiated generation and issue-grounded revision and a structural logical review module for inspecting local coherence and global consistency. A within-subjects study (N=12) provides initial evidence that, in controlled academic writing tasks, LogicTree helps users structure ideas, reduces workload, and improves measured logical quality compared with a conversational baseline.
Visualizations themselves have become a data format. Akin to other data formats such as text and images, visualizations are increasingly created, stored, shared, and (re-)used with artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. In this survey, we probe the underlying vision of formalizing visualizations as an emerging data format and review the recent advance in applying AI techniques to visualization data (AI4VIS). We define visualization data as the digital representations of visualizations in computers and focus on data visualization (e.g., charts and infographics). We build our survey upon a corpus spanning ten different fields in computer science with an eye toward identifying important common interests. Our resulting taxonomy is organized around WHAT is visualization data and its representation, WHY and HOW to apply AI to visualization data. We highlight a set of common tasks that researchers apply to the visualization data and present a detailed discussion of AI approaches developed to accomplish those tasks. Drawing upon our literature review, we discuss several important research questions surrounding the management and exploitation of visualization data, as well as the role of AI in support of those processes. We make the list of surveyed papers and related material available online at ai4vis.github.io.