From Experiments to Dashboards: Modernizing Visdom for Open AI Workflows

AI and scientific computing workflows produce metrics, plots, images, logs, model outputs, and many other experimental results. Developers and researchers need practical ways to inspect this data, compare experiments, and share insights without depending only on closed or heavyweight platforms.

Visdom is an open source tool for creating, organizing, and sharing live visualizations of rich data. Originally developed at Facebook AI Research and later transitioned to FOSSASIA, Visdom has a long history and an existing user base in Python, PyTorch, NumPy, and scientific computing communities.

In this session, François Cartegnie will facilitate the presentation and conversation with Mario Behling and the Visdom team that shares the story of Visdom’s next phase: how the project is being modernized for current AI workflows, what kinds of technical and community challenges come with maintaining an established open source tool, and why open visualization tools remain relevant in today’s AI ecosystem.

The talk will cover two important directions for Visdom: local-first deployment for developers who want to run the tool in their own environment, and a new online version that enables researchers and developers to quickly upload or connect their projects and start using Visdom without setting up their own instance first.

At COSCUP, we will also present the newest release of Visdom and discuss current development directions, including usability, frontend and backend modernization, Python client improvements, documentation, testing, and new visualization features. The session invites COSCUP participants to explore how open source communities can keep important AI tools useful, sustainable, and open.

The session will be held in a mix of English and Chinese, with team members helping with translation to make it accessible to both international and local audiences.