Alon Friedman, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of South Florida. His research integrates visualization education, data science, semiotics, and learning analytics to investigate how individuals interpret, evaluate, and communicate information through visual representations. Trained in information studies, mass media, and statistics, he combines computational modeling with Peircean semiotics to examine how sign structures support meaning-making across contexts. His scholarship advances understanding of how humans and AI systems construct meaning from visual information. He is a leading researcher in visual peer review and directs the development of the Visual Peer Review Dashboard - an NSF-funded interactive platform designed to study rubric-guided critique, sentiment patterns, and behavioral nudges in visualization learning. His recent work extends semiotic analysis to evaluate the interpretive capacities of large language models, examining whether machine-generated outputs exhibit genuine semiosis or surface-level pattern recognition. His publications appear in Computers & Education Open, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, Information Visualization, and Social Semiotics. Across these studies, he connects visualization pedagogy, peer-review dynamics, and semiotic reasoning to articulate how meaning emerges in data graphics and how AI participates in interpretive processes. He also brings over a decade of industry experience in data analytics, visualization design, and web-based interface development - experience that informs his applied and theoretical approach to visual communication, analytic systems, and interface design. He teaches visualization, R programming, and advanced analytics in large-enrollment undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, emphasizing open-source computation, reproducible workflows, and critical visual reasoning. He has supervised doctoral students across information science, computer science, and biology, guiding research on peer-review networks, sentiment modeling, and visual communication. He regularly reviews for the National Science Foundation and leading journals in visualization, information science, and semiotics.