Wei Liu (刘薇)

(“薇” [wēi] is a Chinese character referring to a small, resilient wild herb.)

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Chris North and Dr. Rebecca Faust. I also hold an M.S. in Statistics from Virginia Tech.

My research lies at the intersection of visual analytics, explainable AI, and human–AI collaboration. I design interactive systems that help people interpret and steer machine-learned representations of text data, with a particular focus on text embedding projection spaces and spatialized document layouts. My recent work investigates how large language models can support semantic explanation, context-aware interpretation, and analyst-driven steering in visual text analytics.

More broadly, I aim to build human-centered AI tools that help analysts understand, explore, and guide AI-powered text analysis.

• Email: wliu3@vt.edu