The first VAST session this year was less than exciting. The presented papers mostly did analysis using machine learning or statistics, but the visual parts were rather poor and seemed to have been tacked on at the end to produce an image. One paper in particular, Garg et al's Model-Driven Visual Analytics, looked like a simplified version of Xiao et al's paper at VAST 2006 that did not require models to be built by hand, but rather had a compelling visual interface for that.