Visualization Analysis & Design

Professor Tamara Munzner of the University of British Columbia visited the giCentre in early February.

Tamara gave a giCentre research seminar outlining the approaches to visualization presented in her new book Visualization Analysis & Design.

The book provides a comprehensive and systematic answer to the question - how do we design systems that use visual representations of data to help people carry out data dependent tasks more effectively?

The seminar did so too - introducing Tamara's framework for analyzing the design of visualization systems to ensure that designs are effective for particular tasks and data sets across a variety of application areas.

Research Excellence

The 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) data have been released. The exercise, carried out every 6 years by the UK higher education funding bodies,, is used to assess the quality of research in UK academic institutions. Research was divided into 36 thematic areas and rated on a 5 point scale in a categories including academic output, wider impact and research environment. 

The giCentre has provided an interactive visualization of the results that allow the 50,000 items of data and various ranking metrics to be explored.

Puzzling Seminar

Prof. Marc van Kreveld visited in November to give a research seminar in the Department of Computer Science.

Mark's talk "Puzzles in Wood, Puzzles on Paper, and Puzzles in Bytes" focused on puzzles, their design and difficulty.

The talk included plenty of examples, with puzzles that use wood, metal and paper, some of which Marc had designed and made. 

The talk was relevant to a variety of work undertaken in the School of Mathematics,Computer Science and Engineering including our research involving games, physical objects, creativity and mathematics.