Professor Shixia Liu’s research group in the School of Software is receiving the Best Paper Award for their paper, "RouteFlow: Trajectory-Aware Animated Transitions", at the 43rd ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2025 (CHI 2025).

This paper proposes RouteFlow, a trajectory-aware animated transition method, to address the primary issues in existing animated transition methods that fail to effectively balance the global trend and local hotspots while suffering from severe occlusion between objects. RouteFlow is inspired by a real-world bus route analogy, and formulates the problem of designing animated transitions for trajectory data as a sequential optimization of two sub-problems: bus routing and seat allocation. To address this problem, the paper proposes a bottom-up hierarchical edge bundling algorithm and an incremental circle packing algorithm. Results from quantitative experiments and the user study demonstrate that RouteFlow better facilitates identifying the global trend and locating local hotspots, while performing comparably in tracking objects’ movements. (Project homepage: https://trajectory-anim.github.io/)

Formulation of RouteFlow

CHI is a top-tier conference in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), focusing on innovative research and practical applications in HCI. In 2025, a total of 5014 submissions are received, with 50 papers selected for the Best Paper Award (1% of all submissions). The authors of this paper include: Duan Li, Xinyuan Guo, Xinhuan Shu (Newcastle University, UK), Lanxi Xiao (Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University), Lingyun Yu (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), and Shixia Liu.