Hi there! I am Zekai Shao, a Ph.D candidate in the School of Data Science at Fudan University (FDU), supervised by Prof. Siming Chen and associated with FDU-VIS. I received my bachelor’s degree with honor from Intelligent Science and Technology (Honored Class) at FDU in 2023. Additionally, I’m honored to have taken an internship at Microsoft Research Asia, advised by Dr. Yun Wang and Haidong Zhang.

My research interest lies at the intersection of visualization, data science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. Currently, my primary focus has been on visualization evaluation and storytelling powered by large models. I also have delved into domain-specific visual analytics and general visual analytics frameworks.

If you are interested in my research, please feel free to contact me via gemini25szk@gmail.com.

📖 Publications

CHI 2025

Unlocking Scientific Concepts: How Effective Are LLM-Generated Analogies for Student Understanding and Classroom Practice?

Zekai Shao^*, Siyu Yuan^*, Lin Gao, Yixuan He, Deqing Yang, Siming Chen

The ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025.

PDF arXiv

TVCG 2025

Narrative Player: Reviving Data Narratives with Visuals

Zekai Shao, Leixian Shen, Haotian Li, Yi Shan, Huamin Qu, Yun Wang, Siming Chen

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2025.

PDF DOI arXiv Website

TVCG (PacificVis) 2025

ChartInsighter: An Approach for Mitigating Hallucination in Time-series Chart Summary Generation with A Benchmark Dataset

Fen Wang, Bomiao Wang, Xueli Shu, Zhen Liu, Zekai Shao, Chao Liu, and Siming Chen

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. IEEE PacificVis’25), 2025.

PDF arXiv Github

TVCG (VIS) 2024

Fine‑Tuned Large Language Model for Visualization System: A Study on Self‑Regulated Learning in Education

Lin Gao, Jing Lu, Zekai Shao, Ziyue Lin, Shengbin Yue, Chokit Ieong, Yi Sun, Rory James Zauner, Zhongyu Wei, Siming Chen

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. IEEE VIS’24), 2024.

PDF DOI arXiv

PacificVis 2024

Interpreting Autonomous Driving Corner Cases: A Visual Analytics Approach

Yi Sun, Zekai Shao, Xingyu Qiu, Yun Li, Ting Liu, Linbing Xiang, Dong Sun, Siming Chen

IEEE 17th Pacific Visualization Conference (PacificVis 2024).

PDF DOI

TVCG 2024

LEVA: Using Large Language Models to Enhance Visual Analytics

Yuheng Zhao, Yixing Zhang, Yu Zhang, Xinyi Zhao, Junjie Wang, Zekai Shao, Cagatay Turkay, Siming Chen

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2024.

PDF DOI arXiv

TVCG (VIS) 2023

TransforLearn: Interactive Visual Tutorial for the Transformer Model

Lin Gao, Zekai Shao, Ziqin Luo, Haibo Hu, Cagatay Turkay and Siming Chen

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. IEEE VIS’23), 2024.

PDF DOI

TVCG 2023

Visual Explanation for Open-domain Question Answering with BERT

Zekai Shao, Shuran Sun, Yuheng Zhao, Siyuan Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Tao Gui, Cagatay Turkay, Siming Chen

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2023.

PDF DOI

arXiv 2023

A Comprehensive Capability Analysis of GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 Series Models

Junjie Ye, Xuanting Chen, Nuo Xu, Can Zu, Zekai Shao, et al.

arXiv, 2023, Preprint.

PDF arXiv

🎓 Experience

Education

• 2023.09 - now, School of Data Science, Fudan University (FDU).
  

  Ph.D in Statistics-Machine Learning Track (Elite Ph.D Program of FDU)    Advisor: Siming Chen
  

• 2019.09 - 2023.06, School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University (FDU).
  

  Bachelor in Intelligent Science and Technology (Hornored Class)    Advisor: Siming Chen
  

Visiting

• 2022.11 - 2023.09, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA).
  

  Research Intern in DKI (Data, Knowledge, and Intelligence) Group    Advisor: Yun Wang and Haidong Zhang

  🏆 Selected Awards

• Award of “Analysis-Driven Interaction Design” in IEEE VAST Challenge. 2024
• China National Scholarship. 2023
• Outstanding Graduate of FDU. 2023
• Second Price in Doctoral Forum of SDS，FDU. 2022
• Scholarship for Elite Ph.D. Program of FDU. Begin from 2022.
• Outstanding Innovation Award of SIST, FDU. 2022
• National Second Prize in China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM). 2020
• Outstanding Student Scholarship of FDU. 2020, 2021, 2022
• Outstanding Student and Outstanding League Member of FDU. 2020, 2021, 2022
• First-class Scholarship for Freshmen of FDU. 2019

🤝 Service

• Session Chair: China-R Conference (AI+VIS Session) 2023
• Journal Reviewer: Visual Informatics
• Conference Reviewer: CHI 2024-2025, IUI 2025, CogSci 2025, C&C 2025, PacificVis 2024, ChinaVis 2023-2024
• Conference Volunteer: IEEE VIS 2023
• Teaching Assistant: Image Processing and Data Visualization (honored course) 2023 Fall, Approaching Artificial Intelligence 2024 Fall