Eurovis 2009 Papers

The Eurovis 2009 conference concluded a few days ago in Berlin. Here are some of the papers that I found interesting. Links for all the papers are not available yet, but I shall update the post as and when I find them. Here is the whole list of accepted eurovis 2009 papers.

The keynote talk was given by Pat Hanrahan who is known to give very insightful and thought provoking keynote and capstone talks. This keynote talk was titled Systems of Thought. You can also take a look at his slides from other talks on this website http://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/

This year at the conference, they awarded 3 best paper awards. Congratulations to the authors of the papers! These are the ‘best paper award winners’:

Visualisation of Sensor Data from Animal Movement
Edward Grundy, Mark W. Jones, Robert S. Laramee, Rory P. Wilson and Emily L.C. Shepard – In this paper they present a unique way of visualization data obtained from sensors attached to animals as they move around the world. Animals such as the cormorant, sea turtles and such were tagged with tri axial accelerometers and tracked through time.

On Visualization and Reconstruction from Non-Uniform Point Sets using B-Splines
Erald Vuçini, Torsten Möller and M. Eduard Gröller

Collaborative Brushing and Linking for Co-located Visual Analytics of Document Collections
Petra Isenberg and Danyel Fisher – In this paper they discuss a collaborative interface to interact with a collection of documents. The collaborative interface is called Cambiera and is a table top analytics tool. You can also see a video of users interacting with Cambiera on Youtube.

Here are some of the other papers that I thought were very interesting and hope to go through them in more detail (as they become available) :

Illuminated 3D Scatterplots
Harald Sanftmann, Daniel Weiskopf – In this paper, the authors tackled an important and challenging problem of visualizing 3D scatterplots. 2D scatterplots are well known to convey data effectively. The use of illumination to better visualize the 3D nature of the data was a very elegant solution and seems to work quite well.

Instant Volume Visualization using Maximum Intensity Difference Accumulation
Stefan Bruckner and M. Eduard Gröller – This paper proposes a novel way to integrate along the ray in the volume rendering process. The idea is very unique and provides excellent results. Since techniques such as MIP, DVR are part of every volume rendering course, seeing such novel and interesting techniques is always exciting.

Semi-Automatic Time-Series Transfer Functions via Temporal Clustering and Sequencing
Jonathan Woodring, Han-Wei Shen – Time-varying data visualization is always challenging due to the large amounts of data that needs to be visualized. The authors propose a clustering and sequencing based technique to generate ’semi-automatic’ transfer functions for the data.

A Directional Occlusion Shading Model for Interactive Direct Volume Rendering
Mathias Schott, Vincent Pegoraro, Charles Hansen, Kévin Boulanger, Kadi Bouatouch – I enjoyed reading this paper a lot since people rarely seem to talk about anything other than ambient occlusion these days. This paper presents an elegant and unique way to provide occlusion shading with reasonable frame rates. Looking forward to implementing this soon.

Visualization of Vessel Movements
Niels Willems, Huub van de Wetering, Jarke J. van Wijk – This paper provides a very beautiful solution to the problem of visualizing vessels coming in and out of a port. I enjoy reading J. J. van Wijk’s papers and this and the next one are not any different.

Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization
Danny Holten, Jarke J. van Wijk – The authors follow up on the excellent paper from IEEE Vis 2005 on ‘Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data‘ (which was mentioned in one of my previous posts on Seminal infovis papers), with another great paper. This paper has already received a lot of attention here, here and here. Here is a screenshot showing migration patters in the united states.

Context-Aware Volume Modeling of Skeletal Muscles
Zhicheng Yan, Wei Chen, Aidong Lu, David Ebert

Map Displays for the Analysis of Scalar Data on Cerebral Aneurysm Surfaces
Mathias Neugebauer, Rocco Gasteiger, Oliver Beuing, Volker Diehl, Martin Skalej, Bernhard Preim

Visual Analysis of Brain Activity from fMRI Data
Firdaus Janoos, Boonth Nouanesengsy, Raghu Machiraju, Han Wei Shen, Steffen Sammet, Michael Knopp, István Á. Mórocz

Empowering people with visualization

This post was heavily inspired by an article in the Economist magazine which can be found at http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13725877

I wanted to draw the attention to some of the excellent information from the article and hope that we see many such endeavors. 

Maplight.org – Money and Politics: Illuminating the connection 

Dan Newman of MAPLight.org, a group based in Berkeley, California that charts the links between politicians and money.

With maps, you can show people how an abstract concept connects to where they live.

Starting in January 2007, it tracked which states (those growing sugar-beets and sugar-cane, it turned out) were making the most generous political donations in the run-up to a vote in July 2007 on subsidies for the sugar industry.

The Grim Reaper’s road map: An atlas of mortality in Britain
by Mary Shaw, Bethan Thomas, George Davey Smith and Daniel Dorling. More information, visualizations and even data can be found at 
http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/reaper.html. Here’s a screenshot from their book. 

Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Columbus, Ohio project- Masstrack.org. This visualization shows the geographical locations of the workforce in innovation sectors in Massachusetts. As can be expected, the concentration in the Boston and Cambridge area is very high as compared to the rest of the state. 

Social explorer lets you explore, save and create slidshows of visualizations of the census 2000 data. The first screenshot shows the interface that allows you to interact with the data. The bottom screenshot shows the median age around the New Haven, CT area. Since, New Haven is mostly a college town, the median age being lower than the surrounding counties in Connecticut makes sense.

Ushahidi, which means ”testimony” in Swahili, is a very innovative website that was developed to map user reported violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. It has already been adapted and used by votereport.in and swineflu.ushahidi.com.

The top two images show Violence and Voter inconsistencies as reported by users. The bottommost image shows Swine Flu cases all over the world. Such field reporting-based visualizations can be invaluable, especially now that a worldwide swine flu pandemic has been declared by the WHO. In a previous post, we have seen different visual representations of the Swine Flu Pandemic. 

My favorite quote from the article was “We don’t just want to be about mapping,” says John Kim of Healthy City. “Maps don’t change the world, but people who use maps do.” 

I would like to believe that today we can say something like “Visualizations dont change the world, but people who use visualizations do.” 

If you have seen other examples of visualizations that have impacted policies, laws or helped draw attention to a problem, please add it in the comments section.

Seminal information visualization papers

Here is an article that I wrote at Vizworld.com. Vizworld.com is a great resource for all things related to graphics and visualization and is one of the websites that I regularly visit to keep updated with the field. This article has been updated with resources that some of the visitors mentioned in the comments section and I thank them for the same.

I have been thinking about making a list of some of the most seminal information visualization papers. These are papers that have made an impact and can be widely seen in the media (print/web) or are being adopted in visualization software/systems such as VTK, Prefuse, Many Eyes and so on. I may have missed out on a few papers, so please feel free to add any that you think are ‘must-reads’ for an infovis researcher.

Disclaimer: The list in no particular order of preference.

Here’s the list:

1. Cluster and Calendar based Visualization of Time Series Data, Jarke J. van Wijk and Edward R. van Selow, Proc InfoVis 99, p 4-9.
2. Polaris: A System for Query, Analysis and Visualization of Multi-dimensional Relational Databases, Chris Stolte, Diane Tang and Pat Hanrahan, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2002.
3. The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations, Ben Shneiderman, Proc. 1996 IEEE Visual Languages. An interesting sentence from the paper – “Information exploration is inherently a process with many steps, so keeping the history of actions and allowing users to retrace their steps is important. However, most prototypes fail to deal with this requirement.” I feel that with the amazing ‘provenance’ based work that Claudio Silva’s group at the University of Utah are doing on Vistrails, some of this is being finally addressed.
4. How Not to Lie with Visualization, Bernice E. Rogowitz and Lloyd A. Treinish, Computers In Physics 10(3) May/June 1996, pp 268-273.
5. Excentric Labeling: Dynamic Neighborhood Labeling for Data Visualization. Jean-Daniel Fekete and Catherine Plaisant. Proc. CHI’99, pages 512-519. There is a new paper this year at EuroVis 2009 that extends the techniques proposed in this paper – Extended Excentric Labeling by Enrico Bertini, Maurizio Rigamonti and Denis Lalanne. 
6. VisDB: Database Exploration using Multidimensional Visualization, Daniel A. Keim and Hans-Peter Kriegel, IEEE CG&A, 1994
7. Parallel Coordinates: A Tool for Visualizing Multi-Dimensional Geometry. Alfred Inselberg and Bernard Dimsdale, IEEE Visualization ‘90, 1990.
8. Smooth and Efficient Zooming and Panning. Jack J. van Wijk and Wim A.A. Nuij, Proc. InfoVis 2003, p. 15-22
9. Snap-Together Visualization: Can Users Construct and Operate Coordinated Views? Chris North, B. Shneiderman. Intl. Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Academic Press, 53(5), pg. 715-739, (November 2000)
10. Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention Danyel Fisher, IEEE TVCG 13(6):1184-1191 (Proc. InfoVis 2007).
11. Tree visualization with treemaps: a 2-d space-filling approach, Ben Shneiderman, ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 11, 1 (Jan. 1992) 92-99 and B. Johnson and B. Shneiderman, “Tree-maps: A Space Filling Approach to the Visualization of Hierarchical Information Structures“, Proc. of Vis ‘91, Oct. 1991, pp. 284-291.
12. Danny Holten (2006), Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no 5, pp. 741-748. – This has already been implemented in VTK and is very useful for visualizing hierachical data.
13. Tamara Munzner, Francois Guimbretiere, Serdar Tasiran, Li Zhang, and Yunhong Zhou (2003), TreeJuxtaposer: Scalable Tree Comparison using Focus+Context with Guaranteed Visibility, SIGGRAPH 2003 , published as ACM Transactions on Graphics 22(3), pp. 453-462.
14. M. Stone, “Choosing Colors for Data Visualization“, 2006.
15. Penny Rheingans (1999). Task-based Color Scale Design. Proceedings of Applied Image and Pattern Recognition ‘99, SPIE, pp. 35-43.
16. F. Viegas, M. Wattenberg, F. van Ham, J. Kriss, and M. McKeon, “ManyEyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale“, IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 13, No. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2007, pp. 1121-1128.
17. J. Heer, S. Card, J. Landay, “prefuse: a toolkit for interactive information visualization“, Proceedings of ACM CHI ‘05, April 2005, pp. 421-430.
18. John Lamping , Ramana Rao , Peter Pirolli, A focus+context technique based on hyperbolic geometry for visualizing large hierarchies, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.401-408, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States
19. S. Havre, B. Hetzler, and L. Nowell, “ThemeRiver: Visualizing Theme Changes over Time”, Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE Information Visualization Symposium, Salt Lake City, Oct. 2000, pp. 115-123. Image from Theme river inspired work – Stacked Graphs: Geometry & Aesthetics, Lee Byron, Martin Wattenberg, IEEE InfoVis 2008
20. M. Wattenberg and J. Kriss, “Designing for Social Data Analysis,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Vol. 12, No. 4, Jul.-Aug. 2006, pp. 549-557.

Other than these papers, these books are a source of invaluable advice about visualizing data.

Books

• Tufte, Edward R. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd ed.). Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392142.
• Tufte, Edward R. (1990). Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392118.
• Tufte, Edward R. (1997). Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392126.
• Few, Stephen (2004). Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten. Analytics Press. ISBN 978-0970601995.
• Few, Stephen (2006). Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. O’Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0596100162.
• Few, Stephen (2009). Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis. Analytics Press. ISBN 978-0970601988.
• Ware, C. (2004) Information Visualization: Perception for Design. (2nd Edition) Morgan Kaufman. December, 435 pages.
• Ware, C. (2008) Visual Thinking for Design. Morgan Kaufman
• Casey Reas and Ben Fry (2007), Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. MIT Press. 736 pages.
• Ben Fry (2007), Visualizing Data, O’Reilly. 384 pages.
• William S. Cleveland (1985). The Elements of Graphing Data, Hobart Press.
• William S. Cleveland (1993). Visualizing Data, Hobart Press.

What other papers/books would you add to this list?

Visualization tools and their use

In the past, I have discussed visualization tools and a few companies that make them. They are used by a wide variety of professionals such as the Business Intelligence community, Scientific Data explorers, Financial data analysts and many more users.

I feel though that more often than not such tools are an afterthought in a company’s think tank and require a significant amount of training, learning and overcoming a mental block by the senior management of a company. Companies such as Tableau Software, Spotfire, and many others must have excellent sales teams which, on identifying companies that may be able to benefit from their really stellar software, have to then pitch it to them. Even if the software blows the company management away, the reluctance on their part in adopting it surely must be a problem. Additionally, I am sure that even if the top management think its a great idea, the real users (lower level management/marketing/sales professionals) might not have the time and willingness to invest into using the software.

I know that the people behind these visualization companies are brilliant researchers who are not only innovating in the field of visualization but also taking the extra effort to improve on proven visualization techniques in order to make them easy to use. 

I feel very strongly about this matter and wonder if a few things can be done to avoid this situation in the future. Clearly, just as training radiologists and other medical software users to use 3D volume rendering software is an uphill task, training business analysts to use visualization tools must be a difficult task.

1 – Provide an educational version of the software that can be available and used only through academic institutions. They could be fully featured or have only some evaluation features but let your software be one of the first tools that students use when analyzing their data. That will ensure that at least a few of them will be trained in using the tool when they go on to join a company and root for your visualization software at the company. If you think about it, companies like Microsoft allow free downloads of their express edition of Visual Studio for students which ensures a familiarity with the software that developers then take to companies when they join there. In my experience, students are far more ready to learn new software and technologies as compared to senior management in a company. They also have more time on their hands and can devote more time to learn the spiffy new features in your visualization software.

2 – Developing a course or two for data analysis in conjunction with a professor at a university – Merely providing educational versions of the software is of limited value. An interesting data analysis course that teaches use of your software or two/three other similar software tools along with basics of data analysis and an overview of visualization techniques might be another interesting way to approach the problem.

3 – Provide easy to use learning material – Take the time and make sure to have tutorials and multitudes of examples on your website that will allow users to use them and improve over time. Having a free PDF book or a step-by-step tutorial can vastly benefit the user and take some load off of your hands for training purposes. Tableau software does an amazing job in the training realm as can be seen by the examples at http://www.tableausoftware.com/learning/examples. You can even download a ‘workbook’ for each example and play around with it in your copy of the software.

4 – Provide free training in the form of Webcasts – Recently, nvidia had a few webcasts focused on CUDA and its applicability for general purpose computing on the GPU. The webcast consisted of a few nvidia developers giving a presentation and answering some questions at the end. The webcast was free and was a great way to indoctrinate a few more researchers to use CUDA for which they would have to buy nvidia graphics cards. I thought it was a great idea which could be taken even further when applied to visualization software. If your users already have a running software, then publishing sample datasets and walking them through it can be even more compelling and interactive than reading an online tutorial or a book chapter.

5 – Providing training at a conference or a workshop might be another way to get users to download your evaluation version and play with some data. Google has been doing similar ‘training’ at conferences like SIGGRAPH and IEEE Visualization for the last couple of years now. This helps you get new users as well as allow for professionals attending the conference to learn something they might convey to their company when they go back to work, which could translate into acceptance and added sales for the company.

If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Sorry there are no pretty visualizations in this post

Visualizing the economy and its effects

Other than the standard line/bar charts that you will see showing the state of the economy as measured by some index, here are some interesting ways in which the economy and its impact  is being conveyed. 

• TipStrategies.com have an amazing visualization of the jobs gained dropping around May 2007 and the job losses really picking up in late 2008. Click here to see the entire video progression http://tipstrategies.com/archive/geography-of-jobs/
• Interactive map of job’s per county on Slate.com. You can interact with the map at http://www.slate.com/id/2216238/. Here are two snapshots contrasting the situation from January 2007 with that in March 2009. The entire east coast, major cities in California, Washington, Oregon and the midwest seem to be most affected with job losses.  

• Flowingdata as always has an excellent post on job losses. This snapshot compares the current recession with recessions in the past and job losses in that recession.

 

• There is actually a blog titled Visualizing Economics – http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/. One of my favorite posts on this blog is on the relationship between your occupation and the your income. You can download the original pdf or even buy the original poster at http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/posters. Apparently, podiatrists make just a little less than an average chief executive . Here’s a snapshot

 

• The Associated Press had a news story where they created a ’stress map’. The story can be found at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090518/ap_on_re_us/us_stress_map.You can clearly pinpoint certain regions, but mostly parts of the west coast seems to be affected the most as per their three economic variables – unemployment, foreclosures and  bankruptcy. An interactive visualization can be found at http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/interactives/_national/stress_index/index.html?SITE=YAHOO&SECTION=HOME. Here’s a snapshot of the stress map

• FlowingData.com had yet another great post  showing a visual representation of the seven deadly sins. Interestingly, Wall Street shows up pretty high on the ‘Greed’ visual representation whereas the Wrath can be seen most in the southern and south eastern parts. Looking at Slate’s job losses map above, one could say that job losses are loosely corrleated with anger and ‘wrath’ in certain regions. Las Vegas Sun ran a story on the study and the related visualizations which can be found at http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation-seven-sins/

• GOOD Magazine – has an amazing infographic in a post on the economy. Here’s a lower resolution snapshot of the original. A higher resolution image can be found at http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/goodsheet/goodsheet006economy.html

 

• Investment companies are now making charts to help consumers and clients – Here’s a really nice infographic from Russell Investments 

• Users at Many Eyes have been busy visualizing any data that they can get their hands on as regards to the economy
  • Visualizing President Obama’s speech on the economy - http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/obamas-speech-on-economy-october-200
  • Visualizing Economy and Presidential Administrations – Wonder what President Obama’s data will look like. Here’s a snapshot of the interactive visualization

 

• For those still investing , there’s always SmartMoney’s Treemap-based visualization of the Market situation updated in realtime
• Static Visualization of  the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index - http://www.mamk.net/?p=1644

• What do people think about the situation right now. Twitter feeds pertaining to the economy – http://spy.appspot.com/find/economy?latest=25

Have you seen any other innovative visualizations of the economy, its impact on the United States or the World or any other interesting interactive visualizations related to this topic?

Visualization in Sports

This article is not about “improving your ability in sports using visualization“. This post is focused on the ubiquity of computer graphics and visualization in sports. As a television viewer, player, coach or just a curious  individual, you may have seen some of these visualizations for analyzing a game. It seems more common for coaches to use visual analytic tools to analyze the opposing teams in almost all sports now. 

Visualizing American football (NFL)

• Professor Chris Healey from NCSU has an interesting project on visualizing NFL games. The project details can be found at http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/NFL_viz/.Here is a screenshot of a small section of the visualization of the entire SuperBowl 2009 game between Arizona and Pittsburgh. 

 

•  The NYTimes vis lab has an interesting visualization titled – Rushing points per game – http://vizlab.nytimes.com/visualizations/rushing-points-per-game-nfl-teams-2
• On Many Eyes you can see that common users have generated visualizations of various aspects of football
  • Quarterback salary comparison
  • Graph visualization of the NFL media network
• Visualizing Fantasy Football teams – This paper by Pearlman et al. discussed ways to visualize diversity in a fantasy team and is an interesting read. Jason Pearlman, Penny Rheingans, Marie des Jardins, “Visualizing Diversity and Depth over a Set of Objects,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 35-45, Sep./Oct. 2007, doi:10.1109/MCG.2007.139
• Ben Fry’s post linking the intelligence of a football player with their position on the field. His post talks about how teams have started using Wonderlic test while scouting players and that their performance on that test becomes one of the factors that determines the position they play on the field. Its quite an interesting read supported ofcourse by visual representations. More at  http://benfry.com/writing/archives/147

 

Visualizing Baseball (MLB) 

• Ben Fry strikes(?) again!! His entertaining interactive ‘Salary vs Performance‘ sketch implemented in Processing provides interesting insights into whether the most expensive team is actually performing the best (or NOT as in the case of the New York Yankees )  Visit  http://benfry.com/salaryper/ to play with the sketch and find out how your favorite team is doing.
• A very interesting blogpost on ‘Visualizing Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball‘. A statisticians view on analyzing and visualizing baseball pitches and baseball data in general. Has some good links for baseball related data. 
• Josh Kalk’s amazing tool that lets you create your own baseball graph by using a simple interface – http://baseball.bornbybits.com/php/combined_tool.php. For example, playing around with it I found that Alex Rodriguez hits most home runs on a fastball as compared to a slider or a splitter. 
• Can parallel coordinates be far behind? Parallel coordinates for visualizing baseball statistics – http://www.matthewtavares.com/baseball_report/
• Wow! A Baseball visualization tool – Visual io is a visualization company that produces tools for allowing visual analysis of corporate data. They used to have a baseball visualization tool that has been taken down. It was really cool and more details can be found at http://simplecomplexity.net/2008/11/26/visual-ios-baseball-visualization-tool/
• An interesting article by Dan Fox called “Schrodinger’s Bat” on visualizing baseball pitches. Clearly the title is a play of words on Schrodingers Cat  Here’s a visualization of DiceK’s three pitch types. 

 

Visualizing Basketball (NBA  & WNBA)

• Very interesting post on what combinations of players works best and what styles the teams play – Visualizing the WNBA’s top player combinations
• Links to an excellent article about NBA playing style spectrum.The spectrum of most of the famous basketball players can be found at http://gmapuploader.com/iframe/OcGKRzNj4B. Zoom in to explore it closely.
• David Ng’s final project on Professional Basketball Player Performance Trends  from Hanspeter Pfister’s class at Harvard (http://www.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs171/)  
• ESPN’s Game Flow – Line graph to show the progression of the game 
•  A very amusing visualization correlating Return of Investment on their players. The idea is similar to Ben Fry’s ’salary vs performance’ sketch, but the visualization here is completely different.
• An awesome visualization of all the shots from the NBA 2007-08 season. Check out their processing sketch at http://jasonrbailey.com/jason/courtvis/. Clearly, players prefer to hit three pointers from the corners than anywhere else. 
• More visualization that look like treemaps from – Road to the NBA finals 
• Another visualization showing something they call the Player Genome . They visualize each player’s stats as a color coded line. The entire visualization does look sort of like a genome  

 

Visualizing Cricket 

• -Infographics is widely used in telecasts – Bowling overview, batting overview (wagon wheel) to show which parts of a ground is a particular player hitting to in that innning. A snapshot of a wagon wheel (as it is called) is shown here (Image credits: cricinfo) 

 

• The value of graphical presentation of data: An example from cricket – http://www.mansw.nsw.edu.au/members/reflections/vol23no4skinner.htm

 

Golf swing visualization

• Urtasun et al. published a paper for 3D tracing of the golf swing. Here is the citation and the link to the paper: Raquel Urtasun , David J. Fleet , Pascal Fua, Monocular 3-D Tracking of the Golf Swing , Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’05) – Volume 2, p.932-938, June 20-26, 2005.  Here is a snapshot from their paper.
• Naturally, there would be a company selling a product for such sort of a thing. Flightscope, the company that tracks a tennis ball for debatable calls during a match,  uses 3D Doppler tracking for tracking your golf swing -

I am sure you have seen visualization and infographics being widely used in your favorite sports. Please feel free to add a link or even mention it in the comments section.

Visualizing the Swine Flu pandemic

Given the recent news about the outbreak of Swine Flu in many parts of the world, it has been interesting to see what kind of visual representations do newspapers, websites and print media use to convey the spread of the flu. 

The NYTimes has some very insightful visualizations that provide information regarding the swine flu outbreak in America as well as the world. 

America – http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/26/us/20090427-flu-graphic.html

World (Updated daily – snapshot shown below)- http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/27/us/20090427-flu-update-graphic.html

 

I thought the British Newspaper  Guardian did a great job of providing and visualizing the data worldwide. It would have been a bit more interesting if they would have been able to show the entire globe effectively instead of providing the interactive widget, which is a bit limited I think. The link provides an updated visualization, a snapshot of which is shown below

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/apr/28/swine-flu-outbreak-mexico-pandemic

 

Paul Kedrosky’s blog has an interesting mashup of visualizing the flu in Mexico that used Google Trends to visualize the outbreak in parts of Mexico. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/04/visualizing_swi.html

You can see what people are twittering about Swine Flu in real time at http://spy.appspot.com/find/swine%20flu%20epidemic?latest=25

Heatmaps are a widely used visualization technique that is slowly being used widely to convey information. Danyel Fisher from Microsoft Research had discussed their use for drawing a viewer’s attention to a region of interest in his IEEE paper – “Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention“, IEEE Computer Society, Nov. 2007 .

The H1N1 Swine Flu Map as shown on UMapper uses Heatmaps to visualize the spread of Swine Flu. A snapshot is shown below, whereas an updated version can be found at http://www.umapper.com/maps/view/id/30340/

Ryan Goodman’s blog has a Google Map’s based visualization of America with information regarding the Flu outbreak in various parts of the country. http://ryangoodman.net/blog/index.php/c14/

HealthMap.org has a comprehensive visual representation of swine flu cases recorded so far – http://www.healthmap.org/en

I wonder if these are still the best ways to visualize the data out there. There is some data on Guardian’s website at http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store. There is constantly updated data at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website:  http://www.who.int/csr/don/en/ as well as information regarding America at the CDC’s website at  http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

Have you seen any interesting visualizations that convey the spread better?

IEEE Visualization 2008 papers review

Here’s a really late review of some of my favorite papers from the IEEE Visualization 2008 conference.

 

IEEE Visualization Conference

 

 

Size-based Transfer Functions: A New Volume Exploration Technique – Carlos D. Correa, Kwan-Liu Ma
The idea is to automatically color various features of a dataset based on the local scale of the features. Reading their paper and looking at their amazing images make their techniques seem deceptively easy. You have to only see some of Carlos’ previous work to realize that his visualizations are always impressive and his papers easy to read.

Direct Volume Editing - Kai Bürger, Jens Krüger, Rüdiger Westermann
This paper introduces interactive volume editing. The idea is to allow a user control over the visual appearance of a volume, much like an image editor allows you to edit an image. Here they allow for interactive editing of the volume which includes annotation, coloring and much more. Some of their results are just amazing and could easily pass off as hand-drawn illustrations. 

VisComplete: Automating Suggestions for Visualization Pipelines - David Koop, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, Cláudio T. Silva
This paper is from a long series of papers that showcase the strength of provenance. VisTrails was first introduced at the IEEE Visualization 2005 conference with a demo given by Carlos Scheidegger at the VTK Birds-of-a-Feather session. Since then, not only has it blossomed into a complete and extremely useful product (and spawned a company, VisTrails Inc.). They have published some award winning papers like the IEEE Visualization 2007 Best Paper VisComplete: “Querying and Creating Visualizations by Analogy.” Additionally, many products (Paraview, Maya) are taking note of the power of provenance and working with VisTrails Inc. to incorporate it into their workflow. You can find more information about provenance and VisTrails at http://www.vistrails.org/index.php/Publications_and_Presentations. 

Color Design for Illustrative Visualization 
Lujin Wang, Joachim Giesen, Kevin T. McDonnell, Peter Zolliker, Klaus Mueller
This was a particularly interesting paper since it presented an interesting approach to picking colors for illustrative visualization. I have posted previously on Illustrative visualization and think that it is an exciting field and has many challenges that include perception, cognition and abstraction. It is not merely a stylistic issue but a representational issue where what is shown to the viewer has to be carefully identified and more importantly what is not shown has to be conveyed to the viewer using context or visual cues to convey to the viewer that there is more data that is being abstracted out. Anyway, I enjoyed this paper in particular and look forward to some more papers this year.

Effects of Video Placement and Spatial Context Presentation on Path Reconstruction Tasks with Contextualized Videos 
Yi Wang, Doug Bowman, David Krum, Enylton Coelho, Tonya Smith-Jackson, David Bailey, Sarah Peck, Swethan Anand, Trevor Kennedy, Yernar Abdrazakov
In this paper, the authors presented a system that provides context during virtual navigation using correctly placed videos. An interesting finding in the paper was that participants in their user study were able to perform tasks in unfamiliar environments using only virtual navigation as compared to participants who were navigating in familiar virtual environments. Such work can have a considerable impact on video surveillance systems.
 
Interactive Visual Steering – Rapid Visual Prototyping of a Common Rail Injection System
Krešimir Matković, Denis Gračanin, Mario Jelović, Helwig Hauser
This was a particularly well presented case study where visualization was used for interactive steering in a real world scenario. The authors were candid enough to discuss their design choices and I think we need many more such papers where the process of refinement and discussion is presented to help readers see the iterations instead of a nice finished final product that does everything the collaborators wanted. It was interesting to see the use of multiple coordinated views and parallel coordinates and to read their experiences with using it.

Text Scaffolds for Effective Surface Labeling
Gregory Cipriano, Michael Gleicher
I enjoyed reading this paper and secretly wished that I had developed such a nice way to label data. The paper discusses a technique to label surface data that follows the contours of the surface in a manner similar to what illustrators do when they label illustrations. The images presented in the paper were great and some of the work coming from their group has been particularly interesting. I would also like to draw your attention to their paper from last year’s Vis conference -”Molecular Surface Abstraction“.

 

Were there any specific papers you liked that I may have missed?  Please feel free to comment.

IEEE VisWeek 2008 – Panels overview

 

As part of Visweek, there were a few Panels which I have consistently enjoyed through all these years. The first panel was on 

Grand Challenges for Information Visualization

Panelists: Georges Grinstein, Daniel Keim and Tamara Munzner. All the panelists are well known to the community and provided some very interesting ideas. 

Tamara Munzner gave an interesting talk which resonated with that I believe is necessary for our field. She emphasized on the fact that we ”need open software for open data.”  On numerous occasions, we see wonderful visualization techniques at conferences and in the IEEE TVCG journal, but rarely do we see the source code with some sample datasets being made available. I particularly applaud efforts such as Many eyes, VisTrails and some other visualization toolkits (which I cant think of right now) that allow not only visualization but also some information regarding how the visualization was created. Vistrails goes much farther and even provides detailed information regarding the steps taken by a user to reach a certain point. 

Tamara also proposed a common framework which seems inspired by the field of security and software engineering. It was an interesting way to deal with providing visualization solutions to real world application domain problems. Here slides can be found at www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/talks/vis08/vis08.pdf

I think that some of the ideas that they discussed in the panel are crucial to our field of visualization (not just infovis). We need to make sure that we have something more than a long list of papers (textbooks/introductory 1-day workshops at conferences for first time attendees) for new students and practitioners. I am glad to see such enthusiasm and fervor as was palpable at the panel and hope to see many more such events that make us think as a community. I wasnt able to attend the entire panel and so if any of you have any comments on the same, please feel free to add them here. 

Building a Research Group in Visualization

Panelists: Hamish Carr, Sheelagh Carpendale, Thomas Ertl, Helwig Hauser, Chris Johnson, Min Chen, Stephen North

This panel was hosted by Hamish Carr, who is at the University College Dublin. The panel started out with each of the esteemed panelists discussing what worked and how things worked out for them as a researcher as well as a research group. 

Sheelagh Carpendale spoke first and basically said that she had identified five components to ’success’ as regards forming a creative, productive research group. The five components are (i) Collaboration – Where multiple students collaborate and get more done by helping each other out. (ii) Competition – where students or sub-groups within the lab compete in a healthy manner towards evaluating techniques, developing software modules etc. (iii) Mentoring – Each new student is paired up with a senior member in the lab to help with adjusting to the lab as well as getting up to speed with research in the field. (iv) Individualism – It is critical to identify individual pieces for students so that they can claim ownership of a part of the project. She mentioned that its also important to encourage students to think on their own. (v) Scaffolding – Last but not the least, scaffolding is the glue that provides a productive environment to the students and researchers in the lab. Providing students with sufficient, high quality resources helps them achieve their goals as well as helps the faculty member achieve their goals. 

Min Chen focused on challenges of leading a smallish research group. He spoke about how the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) process helped and shaped his research group as well as the department’s growth at Swansea University, UK. Particularly, he spoke about how he read books on managing groups such as ‘Handbook of Small Group Research‘  by A. Paul Hare, which apparently is out of circulation. The amusing part of his talk was that the book had examined criminal gangs and figured out some of the rules and ideas about what works and doesnt work from observing gang leaders and the gang as a whole. He also spoke on how their group outings are mostly research focused and that has helped them grow as well as form connections with other faculty in the department. 

Thomas Ertl spoke next on how his experience in astrophysics as well as industry helped him immensely. He said that having started his own company before becoming a faculty member, convinced him of the need of selling. By selling he meant selling an idea, a concept and so on. He said that writing skills can definitely be improved and there is no excuse to poor communication skills. One needs to be able to convince the reader/person sitting in front of you of the viability of your idea/algorithm/system. He said that “Success is a combination of individual performance and how others perceive you.” He said that in his lab he has always encouraged collaboration as opposed to competition. 

Helwig Hauser spoke about the balance between demands (financial, research, departmental) as a professor versus own choices as regards research, research topic etc. He said that one should always keep an eye on the practical assets when conducting research. He defined them as software, algorithms and tools. He also spoke about the need to balance reactive vs proactive approaches to research. In some cases, one needs to work on a project to fund the research that one is more interested in. 

Chris Johnson discussed how his small research lab of one student grew to a small research group and that grew into a large research group which in turn grew into a centre and now its a huge institute (Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute). He said that only through collaborations and having a big group of smart people around you, can you do more interesting science than just by working by yourself. He spoke abut how its always challenging to manage large groups but he said that they are very careful when hiring new faculty/researchers since one disgruntled person can make the environment unproductive. 

Stephen North from AT&T Research labs gave the industry perspective to managing research groups. He said that the funding is more or less stable but its very important to have executive support from within the company. He said that long term goals and views are important for a research group, but also said that its not always possible to meet all the long term goals. 

This was followed by an excellent discussion where attendees asked panelists some insightful questions. Instead of trying to summarize the interaction, I would like to direct you to Carlos Scheidegger’s excellent summarization of the Q&A session that followed. 

Unfortunately, I could not make it to the Visual Analytics panel. Please let me know if any of you attended that session.

IEEE Vis 2008 Keynote – Margaret Livingstone

What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain

Margaret S. Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

I knew the keynote talk at the IEEE Visualization conference was going to be interesting when the student volunteer at the door handed me stereo glasses before the talk. The talk was focused on introducing concepts about color and luminance that artists have been using effectively for hundreds of years.

In the first part of the talk, she focused on introducing concepts such as centre-surround. 

Some of the highlights from her talk are as follows: 

- In some cases, color contrast is not equal to luminance contrast. 

- People are good at recognizing objects from different points of view. This might be interesting since there seems to be considerable amount of work in graphics and visualization on finding the ‘best’ view for a particular dataset. 

- Equiluminance – In the paper “Vernier and Displacement Thresholds in Equiluminance” by Masami Funakawa, equiluminance is introduced as follows 

The notion of equiluminance is based upon the assumption that in the human visual system there are two kinds of visual pathway, i.e., luminance and chromatic pathway. An equiluminous stimulus varies in color, but not in luminance, so that it is assumed to be signaled by the chromatic system, but not by the luminance system. In psychophysical studies these stimuli are used to isolate and probe the chromatic system. 

 This webpage describes the use of equiluminance in art and how luminance affects our perception http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/anuszkiewicz.html

 - Depth can be conveyed using motion, shading, perspective projection, occlusion and stereopsis. 

- Luminance contrast: As long as the luminance is appropriate, shape can be conveyed. She showed some interesting examples of paintings [Matisse's The Woman in a Hat] and visual representations, where the colors were unnatural but it did not affect the perceived shape of face/object. 

- Yellow, Blue and White, when used appropriately can convey motion in static images. This was demonstrated by showing some work  by Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s Rotating Snakes (left image below) and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. It reminded me of the SIGGRAPH 2008 paper on 
Self-Animating Images: Illusory Motion Using Repeated Asymmetric Patterns by Ming-Te Chi et al.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The images in this paper seem to use a similar principle and are very effective and conveying motion. 

- Our central vision has high acuity whereas our peripheral vision was lower acuity. We dont seem to notice the fact that our peripheral vision has lower resolution since we move our eyes rapidly over scenes. This reminded me of the keynote from IEEE Vis 2004, where the speaker, Wilson Geisler, gave an amazing demonstration of this phenomena. 

She said that Mona Lisa’s smile was particularly enigmatic since one feels her expression changing depending on whether one focuses on the eyes or the mouth. Her lab has conducted research on the same and by filtering if they have been able to create representations of how our peripheral and central vision interpret the painting, as shown here   

The last part of the talk focused on the use of stereopsis by artists in making more realistic paintings. She found that many artists lack the ability to see stereopsis and that makes them see a flat world which they capture on canvas. This can be identified by looking at the glint in the eye of the photo/painting and if both the glints are not synchronized, chances are that the person lacks the ability to see stereopsis. Through her research, she found many famous artists to have misaligned eyes including the painter Rembrandt. Photographs of Babe Ruth too seemed to imply that he had misaligned eyes. 

The end of the talk kept us wanting for more and I guess that implies that it was a great keynote talk.