Welcome to VL/HCC 2025

From the beginning of the computer age, people have sought easier ways to learn, express, and understand computational ideas. Whether this meant moving from punch cards to textual languages, or command lines to graphical UIs, the quest to make computation easier to express, manipulate, and understand by a broader group of people is an ongoing challenge.

The IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing is the premier international forum for research on this topic. Established in 1984, the mission of the conference is to support the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and languages for programming, modeling, and communicating, which are easier to learn, use, and understand by people.

The 2025 symposium is scheduled to take place in October 2025 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. VL/HCC 2024 is Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC).

Call for Research Papers

Scope and Topics

We solicit original, unpublished research papers on computing technologies for modeling, programming, communicating, and reasoning, which are easier to learn, use or understand by humans than the current state-of-the-art. Papers should focus on efforts to design, formalize, implement, or evaluate those technologies and languages. This includes technologies intended for general audiences (e.g., professional or novice programmers, or the public) or domain-specific audiences (e.g., people working in business administration, production environments, healthcare, urban design or scientific domains). Empirical papers that validate current proposed solutions with rigorous scientific means (i.e., empirical studies, controlled experiments, rigorous case studies, etc.) are also welcome.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Visual languages: Novel visual languages, Design, evaluation, and theory of visual languages and applications, Development of systems for manipulating and interacting with diagrammatic representations
Human aspects and psychology of software development and language design, such as supporting inclusion and diversity in programming
End-user development, adaptation and programming, Creation and evaluation of technologies and infrastructures for end-user development
Representations: Novel representations and user interfaces for expressing computation, Software, algorithm and data visualization
Modeling: Model-driven development, Domain-specific languages, including modeling languages, Visual modeling of human behavior and socio-technical systems
Thinking more deeply about code: Debugging, program comprehension, code review, Explainable ML/AI
Future of work with AI: Human-Centric AI-based tools, modeling end-user interactions with AI powered tools
Low-Code/No-Code paradigm: Approaches for creation and deployment of fully functional applications using visual abstractions and interfaces
Education and Computational thinking: using visual languages in education, teaching human-centric principals, educator and student perspectives

If you are not sure if your paper is a good fit for VL/HCC, feel free to email the PC Co-chairs (see “Contact” below). We welcome those new to the VL/HCC community to submit!
Special Emphasis for 2025: Human-AI Collaboration

We seek research that highlights the situations in which human-AI interactions enhance, or degrade, the human experience in computing. Papers describing positive, negative and unclear impacts are all welcome.
Paper Submissions

We invite two kinds of papers:

full-length papers, up to 10 pages - plus unlimited additional pages containing only references and/or acknowledgements
short papers, up to 5 pages - plus unlimited additional pages containing only references and/or acknowledgements

All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete, self-contained, archival contributions. Contributions from full papers are more extensive than those from short papers. Papers do not have to reach the maximum page limit, but they should be of an appropriate length for the content. Note that some full paper submissions may be accepted as short papers if reviewers deem contributions to be comparable in size to a short paper.

Papers could be research findings, industry experience reports, replication studies, or vision papers. Please select the appropriate page length for the content of your paper.

Papers must be submitted using the IEEE two-column conference paper format. Be sure to use the current IEEE conference paper format (which was updated in 2019), and to select the “US letter” template

Papers should be submitted via the EasyChair system.

To facilitate the assigning of papers to reviewers, we authors should submit paper abstracts via EasyChair at least 1 week prior to the paper submission deadline (see Important Dates below). The abstract must be no longer than 250 words.

All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee in a double-anonymous review process. Authors will then receive the reviews for their submissions and will be able to answer them in a rebuttal phase. Only after this step will the PC make a final decision about the acceptance of the submissions. Submissions and reviews for the technical program are managed with EasyChair. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for VL/HCC 2025 and present the paper at the conference. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference, including IEEE Xplore Digital Library, if the paper is not presented by the author at the conference.

The proceedings of IEEE VL/HCC are published in digital form by the IEEE Computer Science Society and archived in the IEEE Digital Library with an official ISBN number. Accepted papers will be available to conference attendees via the IEEE Open Preview program in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library).
Double-Anonymous Reviewing

We follow a double-anonymous reviewing process. Both authors and reviewers are expected to make every effort to honor the double-anonymous reviewing process. In case of questions, please contact the Program Chairs. Authors should ensure that the submission can be evaluated without it being obvious who wrote the paper. This means leaving author names off the paper and using terms like “previous research” rather than “our previous research” when describing background. However, do not hide previous work – papers must still reference all relevant research using full (non-anonymized) citations, including the author’s own prior work, so that reviewers can evaluate novelty. Please reference your own prior work in the third-person just like you would do for any other related work (e.g., avoid “As described in our previous work [10], … ” and instead write something like “As described by [10], …”). It is also important that authors specify all conflicts of interest with potential reviewers during the submission phase. Reviewers should not undertake any investigation that might lead to the revealing of authors’ identity. If identities are inadvertently revealed, please contact the Program Chairs. The Program Chairs will check all submissions for obvious signs of lack of anonymity and may ask authors to make changes and resubmit the paper within three days of the submission deadline. Only changes to resolve anonymity issues will be permitted.
Evaluation and Justification

Papers are expected to support their claims with appropriate evidence. For example, a paper that claims to improve programmer productivity is expected to demonstrate improved productivity; a paper that claims to be easier to use should demonstrate increased ease of use.

However, not all claims necessarily need to be supported with empirical evidence or studies with people. For example, a paper that claims to make something feasible that was clearly infeasible might substantiate its claim through the existence of a functioning prototype.

Moreover, there are many alternatives to empirical evidence that may be appropriate for justifying claims, including analytical methods, formal arguments or case studies. Given this criterion, we encourage potential authors to think carefully about what claims their submission makes and what evidence would adequately support these claims.

Replication papers will be evaluated on their own merit in terms of methods used, findings discussed and comparison to original studies in terms of different context or use of different methods.

Vision papers should make a case for future needs and research directions in VL and/or HCC community interest areas within a timeline of the next 5 to 10 years.

Industrial experience reports with VL and/or HCC topics should describe context, lessons learned (positive or negative), and recommendations for research and practice as appropriate.

We expect short papers to have less comprehensive evaluation than full-length papers, and may have less technical detail, but sufficient to make the case for the contribution. New ideas and early research results would be expected to use a short paper format.
Adhering to IEEE Guidelines

Please be sure that your submission follows the IEEE requirements

Especially around Human Subject approvals and use of Generative AI:
Research on Human and Animal Subjects

Excerpted from the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) Operations Manual, sections 8.1.1.E. Also see section 8.2.1.B.6.

Authors of articles reporting on research involving human subjects or animals, including but extending beyond medical research, shall include a statement in the article that the research was performed under the oversight of an institutional review board or equivalent local/regional body, including the official name of the IRB/ethics committee, or include an explanation as to why such a review was not conducted. For research involving human subjects, authors shall also report that consent from the human subjects in the research was obtained or explain why consent was not obtained.
Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Text

The use of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in a paper (including but not limited to text, figures, images, and code) shall be disclosed in the acknowledgments section of any paper submitted to an IEEE publication. The AI system used shall be identified, and specific sections of the paper that use AI-generated content shall be identified and accompanied by a brief explanation regarding the level at which the AI system was used to generate the content.

The use of AI systems for editing and grammar enhancement is common practice and, as such, is generally outside the intent of the above policy. In this case, disclosure as noted above is recommended.
Important Dates

Abstracts only: May 9, 2025
Submission deadline: May 16, 2025
Rebuttal phase: June 30 - July 3, 2025
Notification: July 18, 2025
Camera-ready: August 8, 2025
Conference: October 6-10, 2025

All deadlines are AoE.
Contact

Emerson Murphy-Hill (Microsoft, USA, captain.emerson@gmail.com)
Katie Stolee (North Carolina State University, USA, ktstolee@ncsu.edu)