Graduate Student Received a Travel Award from VL/HCC 2025 Graduate Consortium

Supriya Kottam’s work, “Bridging Natural Language and SQL with an LLM-Powered Visual Interface”, has been accepted to the Graduate Consortium at the 2025 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), a premier A-level conference in human-centric computing and visual programming. She has also received a travel award supported by an NSF grant to attend the event.
Supriya recently graduated from our master’s program and will begin her PhD studies in Fall 2025. Her research, mentored by Dr. Yingcheng Sun, addresses a key challenge in data accessibility: enabling users without formal technical training to write Structured Query Language (SQL). Traditional dashboards and visual query builders often demand schema expertise and falter with complex logic, while text-to-SQL systems—despite their flexibility—are typically black boxes lacking transparency. To overcome these limitations, Supriya and Dr. Sun proposed VISTA (Visual Interactive SQL Translation Architecture), an innovative system powered by multi-agent Large Language Models (LLMs). VISTA provides a unified, bidirectional interface that enables users to interact with and refine queries through both natural language and visual representations, promoting transparency, usability, and control. The full paper will appear on the official VL/HCC 2025 conference website.