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Hrim Mehta

Graduate Student – PhD

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at UOIT, co-supervised by Dr. Christopher Collins and Dr. Fanny Chevalier. My main interest lies in mixed-initiative visual analytics. I’m currently developing a framework to formalize and guide the design of semi-automated narratives or tours to prompt and sustain the process of data exploration.

I received my Master’s in Computer Science from UOIT in 2015 under the co-supervision of Dr. Christopher Collins and Dr. Mark Hancock. My thesis focused on leveraging free-form ink annotations, made when performing a close reading, as implicit interactions to augment a literary critic’s analysis process with real-time context-specific metadata.

Contact

If you’d like to know more about my work, send me an email (hrim.mehta@ontariotechu.ca) or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Publications

  • Mehta, H., Chalbi, A., Chevalier, F., & Collins, C. (2017). DataTours: A data narratives framework [Poster]. IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (InfoVis).

    PDF 
    @poster{meh2017b,
author = {Hrim Mehta and Amira Chalbi and Fanny Chevalier and and Christopher Collins},
title = {DataTours: A Data Narratives Framework},
booktitle = {Proc. of IEEE Conf. on Information Visualization (InfoVis), Posters},
series = {Poster},
address = {Phoenix, USA},
year = 2017
}

  • Mehta, H., Bradley, A. J., Hancock, M., & Collins, C. (2017). Metatation: Annotation as implicit interaction to bridge close and distant reading. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 24(5), Article 35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3131609

    PDF 
    @article{meh2017a,
title={Metatation: Annotation as Implicit Interaction to Bridge Close and Distant Reading},
author={Hrim Mehta and Adam James Bradley and Mark Hancock and Christopher Collins},
journal = {ACM Trans. on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)},
publisher={ACM},
pages = {35:1--35:41},
articleno = {35},
numpages = {41},
year=2017,
doi = {10.1145/3131609}
}

  • Bradley, A. J., Mehta, H., Hancock, M., & Collins, C. (2016). Visualization, digital humanities, and the problem of instrumentalism. In IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH).

    PDF 
    @InProceedings{bra2016,
author = {Adam James Bradley and Hrim Mehta and Mark Hancock, and Christopher Collins},
title = {Visualization, Digital Humanities, and the Problem of Instrumentalism},
booktitle = {IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH)},
year = 2016,
venue = {Baltimore, USA},
eventdate = {2016-10-24}
}

  • Mehta, H. (2015). Augmenting Free-Form Annotations with Digital Metadata for Close Reading of Poetry [Master’s thesis, University of Ontario Institute of Technology].

    PDF 
    @MastersThesis{meh2015a,
author = {Hrim Mehta},
title = {Augmenting Free-Form Annotations with Digital Metadata for Close Reading of Poetry},
school = {University of Ontario Institute of Technology},
year = 2015
}

  • Kondo, B., Mehta, H., & Collins, C. (2014). Glidgets: Interactive glyphs for exploring dynamic graphs [Poster]. IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (InfoVis).

    PDF 
    @poster{kon2014c,
author = {Brittany Kondo and Hrim Mehta and Christopher Collins},
title = {Glidgets: Interactive Glyphs for Exploring Dynamic Graphs},
booktitle = {Proc. of IEEE Conf. on Information Visualization (InfoVis)},
note = {Best Poster Award},
series = {Poster},
address = {Paris, France},
year = 2014
}

  • Rajaram, S., Surale, H. B., McConkey, C., Rognon, C., Mehta, H., Glueck, M., & Collins, C. (2025). Gesture and audio-haptic guidance techniques to direct conversations with intelligent voice interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714310

    PDF 
    @inproceedings{10.1145/3706598.3714310,
author = {Rajaram, Shwetha and Surale, Hemant Bhaskar and McConkey, Codie and Rognon, Carine and Mehta, Hrim and Glueck, Michael and Collins, Christopher},
title = {Gesture and Audio-Haptic Guidance Techniques to Direct Conversations with Intelligent Voice Interfaces},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400713941},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714310},
doi = {10.1145/3706598.3714310},
abstract = {Advances in large language models (LLMs) empower new interactive capabilities for wearable voice interfaces, yet traditional voice-and-audio I/O techniques limit users’ ability to flexibly navigate information and manage timing for complex conversational tasks. We developed a suite of gesture and audio-haptic guidance techniques that enable users to control conversation flows and maintain awareness of possible future actions, while simultaneously contributing and receiving conversation content through voice and audio. A 14-participant exploratory study compared our parallelized I/O techniques to a baseline of voice-only interaction. The results demonstrate the efficiency of gestures and haptics for information access, while allowing system speech to be redirected and interrupted in a socially acceptable manner. The techniques also raised user awareness of how to leverage intelligent capabilities. Our findings inform design recommendations to facilitate role-based collaboration between multimodal I/O techniques and reduce users’ perception of time pressure when interleaving interactions with system speech.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {1133},
numpages = {20},
keywords = {multimodal interaction, voice interfaces},
location = {
},
series = {CHI '25}
}

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