Alexander Lex, University of Utah

Seminar - Alexander Lex, University of Utah

Literate Visualization:

Making Visual Analysis Sessions Reproducible and Reusable

Tues 17th November, 16:00 - 17:00, Zoom (City credentials)

Abstract

Interactive visualization is an important part of the data science process. It enables analysts to directly interact with the data, exploring it with minimal effort. Unlike code, however, an interactive visualization session is ephemeral and can't be easily shared, revisited, or reused. Computational notebooks, such as Jupyter Notebooks, R Markdown, or Observable are a perfect match for many data science applications. They are also the most popular embodiment of Knuth's "Literate Programming", where the logic of a program is explained in natural language, figures, and equations.

In this talk, Alex will sketch approaches to "Literate Visualization". He will show how we can leverage provenance data of an analysis session to create well-documented and annotated visualization stories that enable reproducibility and sharing. He will also introduce work on semi-automatically inferring mid-level analysis goals, which allows us to understand the analysis process at a higher level. Understanding analysis goals enables interactions to be sped up and visual analysis processes to be re-used.

Bio - Alex Lex

Alexader Lex is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Together with Miriah Meyer, he runs the Visualization Design Lab, which is developing visualization methods and systems to help solve today’s scientific problems.

Before joining the University of Utah, Alex was a lecturer and post-doctoral visualization researcher at Harvard University. He received his PhD, master’s, and undergraduate degrees from Graz University of Technology. In 2011 he was a visiting researcher at Harvard Medical School.

Alex has received an NSF CAREER award and multiple best paper awards or honorable mentions at IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and other conferences. He also received a best dissertation award from his alma mater and co-founded Datavisyn, a startup company developing visual analytics solutions for the pharmaceutical industry.

Coronavirus Visualization

Coronavirus infection rates and case numbers are a growing concern in England. So analysing change-over-time in growth rates, as well as both absolute (total number) and relative cases counts (as a proportion of population size) is particularly important.

Doing this analysis for multiple areas at the same time (e.g. for Local Authorities in England) is a considerable challenge, but well-designed visualizations have a role to play and can expose some important patterns when we look at rates and numbers across the country.

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Roger Beecham and Jason Dykes discuss ways in which this might be achieved in their Coronavirus Visualization twitter thread.

DisInfoVis - Articles, Videos, Poster

MSc Data Science graduate Alexa Pavliuc has been working in DisInfoVis - exploring the design and use of temporal networks for visualizing disinformation operations.

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Alexa's work has been published through a EuroVIS 2020 poster and two Medium articles. The first is on her MSc Research - DisInfoVis: How to Understand Networks of Disinformation Through Visualization.

The second is based on additional work undertaken with the Mozilla Foundation and visualizes six Twitter-based disinformation operations - Watch six decade-long disinformation operations unfold in six minutes.

You can find more details on Alexa’s DisInfoVis repository.

Thanks to the Data Science Institute at City for awarding the stipend through which Alexa was able to complete much of the work. And best wishes to Alexa as she begins a DPhil in Social Data Science at the University of Oxford, where she will continue her studies of networks of disinformation.

Charity Executives Networking Lunch

We’re meeting with local organizations on December 11th as part of City’s Social Responsibility programme.

Links related to the giCentre talk are here :

• https://www.gicentre.net/networkingdec19

Criteria for Rigor in Visualization Design Study

Jason Dykes and Miriah Meyer of the Visualization Design Lab, University of Utah, presented their 'rigor' paper at IEEE VIS in Vancouver. The paper intends to move visualization design researchers away from the kinds of system related findings and process orientated validation approach that are typical of design studies and towards ways of developing subjective knowledge constructs from applied visualization design contexts.

The paper frames visualization design study through an interpretivist perspective and aims to give design study researchers criteria that support subjective, reflexive, constructive activity. The paper also taps in to the 'design as research' and 'artefact as knowledge' strands of design (research) to frame the kinds of creative design and thinking that we do in visualization. It intends to give visualization researchers who design in applied contexts confidence in developing and presenting knowledge constructs relating to their experiences and observations of people using visualization to explore data.

Check out the 10-page IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics paper, or watch the 12 minute IEEE VIS presentation to find out how design study research may benefit from explicitly considering six criteria: INFORMED; ABUNDANT; REFLEXIVE; PLAUSIBLE; RESONANT; TRANSPARENT

Dr. Cagatay Turkay - EuroVis Young Researcher 2019

Cagatay receives the award from Prof. Min Chen of the Oxford e-Research Centre - University of Oxford.

We're delighted and excited to congratulate Dr. Cagatay Turkay.

He was named as EuroVis Young Researcher 2019 at EuroVis in Porto.

The award recognises the outstanding scientific contributions Cagatay has made to the European Visualization community over the last 5 years. EuroVis is the primary conference and organization for visualization research in Europe.

The award acknowledges the series of outstanding contributions Cagatay has made to Visual Data Science. These have been established through visualisations, interactions, and computational methods that enable an effective combination of human and machine capabilities to facilitate data-intensive problem solving.

The committee particularly recognised Cagatay’s highly innovative and influential contributions in the visual analysis of high-dimensional data that are helping the community explore, develop and assess the roles and potential for Visual Data Science.

He was awarded a very heavy and sharp looking glass trophy that didn't seem particularly hand-luggage friendly.

Seminar - Prof Sheelagh Carpendale

Interactive Information Visualization

Monday 13th May

16:00 - 17:30

A130 (College Building)

Information visualization is being increasingly recognized as having a crucial role to play in our burgeoning data society. Yet, finding the right visualization for a specific data set, a given data task, or an evidence-based decision support tool can still be elusive. Prof. Sheelagh Carpendale will discuss her continued research towards promoting data comprehension by creating appropriate interactive visual tools that can help people negotiate the everyday transformation of vast amounts of information into knowledge. Specifically, Sheelagh will talk about her research into extending the available visual representations, using interaction to expand the potential of existing visualizations, and into broadening the potential of information visualization by investigating engagement with new audiences.  While data has the potential to enrich people’s lives, there are still many challenges in how to make it comprehensible, accessible and transparent. Sheelagh continues to explore how to best use interactive visualizations to develop tools that fit and support people’s everyday work and social practices in her broad portfolio of research.

BIO: Sheelagh Carpendale is a Full Professor at Simon Fraser University in the School of Computing Science. She holds an NSERC/AITF/SMART Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies and has held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Information Visualization. Her most recent awards include the IEEE Visualization Career Award and being inducted into the ACM CHI Academy. She has also received many other awards including the NSERC E.W.R. STEACIE Fellowship, a BAFTA in Interactive Learning; the Alberta ASTech Award, the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award, and was featured in Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council - State of the Nation 2012 - report. Dr. Carpendale directs the Innovations in Visualization (InnoVis) research group and initiated the interdisciplinary graduate program, Computational Media Design. She is an internationally renowned leader in both information visualization and large display interaction. Her research focuses on information visualization, interaction design, and qualitative empirical research. By studying how people interact with information both in work and social settings, she works towards designing more natural, accessible and understandable interactive visual representations of data. She combines information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction with innovative new interaction techniques to better support the everyday practices of people who are viewing, representing, and interacting with information.