Revisiting Good Blogs: Nathan Yau's Flowing Data

One of my favorite blogs is FlowingData, Nathan Yau's labor of love for the past several years. Nathan is a UCLA PhD candidate in statistics with a focus in data visualization.  He shares interesting tidbits of information on his blog, including those that relate to his main interests, social data visualization, self-surveillance, and data for non-professionals.  He supports accessible and useful data visualization.


Nathan is the author of  the book, Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics,  nicely explained in the video below:

INTERACTIVE TABLETOPS AND SURFACES 2011 CALL FOR PAPERS AND NOTES (6th Annual ACM ITS 2011 - Nov. 13-16)

Thanks to Johannes Schöning for sharing this information!

CALL FOR PAPERS AND NOTES

6th Annual ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2011

ITS 2011

November 13-16, 2011

Portopia Hotel, Kobe, Japan

http://its2011.jp/

The Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2011 Conference (ITS) is a premiere venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies. As a new community, we embrace the growth of the discipline in a wide variety of areas, including innovations in ITS hardware, software, design, and projects expanding our understanding of design considerations of ITS technologies and of their applications.

Building on their success in previous years, ITS again features Papers and Notes presentations, as well as tutorials, posters, demonstrations tracks and a doctoral symposium. ITS 2011 will also include workshops.

ITS 2011 will bring together top researchers and practitioners who are interested in both the technical and human aspects of ITS technology. On behalf of the conference organizing committee, we invite you to begin planning your submissions and participation for this year's conference!

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: PAPERS AND NOTES

The use of interactive surfaces is an exciting and emerging research area. Display technologies, such as projectors, LCD and OLED flat panels, and even flexible display substrates, coupled with input sensors capable of enabling direct interaction, make it reasonable to envision a not-so-distant future in which many of the common surfaces in our environment will function as digital interactive displays. ITS brings together researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds and interests, such as camera and projector based systems, new display technologies, multi-touch sensing, user interface technologies, augmented reality, computer vision, multimodal interaction, novel input and sensing technologies, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and information visualization.

The intimate size of this single-track symposium provides an ideal venue for leading researchers and practitioners to exchange research results and experiences. We encourage submissions on (but not limited to) the following topic areas as they relate to interactive tabletops and surfaces:

* Gesture-based interfaces

* Multi-modal interfaces

* Tangible interfaces

* Novel interaction techniques

* Data handling/exchange on large interactive surfaces

* Data presentation on large interactive surfaces

* Software engineering methods

* Computer supported collaborative work

* Middleware and network support

* Virtual reality and augmented reality

* Social protocols

* Information visualizations

* Hardware, including sensing and input technologies with novel capabilities

* Human-centered design & methodologies

* Applications

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

Conference Co-Chairs

Jun Rekimoto, The University of Tokyo / SonyCSL, Japan

Hideki Koike, University of Electro-Communications, Japan

Kentaro Fukuchi, Meiji University, Japan

Program Co-Chairs

Yoshifumi Kitamura, Tohoku University, Japan

Daniel Wigdor, University of Toronto, Canada

SUBMISSIONS

Papers/Notes: We invite paper submissions of two kinds: Papers (10 pages) and Notes (4 pages). Papers must present original, highly innovative, prospective and forward-looking research, possibly in one or more of the themes given above. Notes must also report novel and complete research, but where the scope and scale of the contribution is more focused and succinct than papers. Submissions must be submitted as a single PDF file in the ACM format through the submission system. A template for submissions can be found on the ITS

website (http://its2011.jp/).

All accepted submissions will be presented at ITS 2011 and appear in the ITS digital proceedings and be archived in the ACM digital library.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper/Note Submissions: June 30, 2011

Paper/Note Author Notifications: September 2, 2011

Paper/Note Camera-Ready Deadline: October 21, 2011

The calls for the posters, demos, tutorials, workshops and the doctoral symposium will be published soon, please check our website for further information.

RELATED

ITS 2010 Proceedings

ITS 2010 Awards

Best Paper:	Proxemic Interaction: Designing for a Proximity and Orientation-Aware Environment by Till Ballendat, Nicolai Marquardt, Saul Greenberg
Best Note:	MudPad: Tactile Feedback and Haptic Texture Overlay for Touch Surfaces by  Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
Best Poster:	A Multi-Touch Alignment Guide for Interactive Displays by Mathias Frisch, Ricardo Langner, Sebastian Kleinau, Raimund Dachselt
Best Demo:	MudPad - A Tactile Memory Game by Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers

Best Paper:	Proxemic Interaction: Designing for a Proximity and Orientation-Aware Environment by Till Ballendat, Nicolai Marquardt, Saul Greenberg
Best Note:	MudPad: Tactile Feedback and Haptic Texture Overlay for Touch Surfaces by Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
Best Poster:	A Multi-Touch Alignment Guide for Interactive Displays by Mathias Frisch, Ricardo Langner, Sebastian Kleinau, Raimund Dachselt
Best Demo:	MudPad - A Tactile Memory Game by Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers

Who's Who

ITS 2010Conference General Chairs 

Johannes Schöning, DFKI GmbH
Antonio Krüger, DFKI GmbH 

ITS 2010 Organization Committee

Daniel Wigdor, one of the ITS 2011Program Co-chairs, co-authored the following book with Dennis Wixon. The book has not yet been released.
 
Brave NUI World: Designing User Interfaces for Touch and Gesture

Note: This post includes links, please let me know of anything I should correct.

VisWeek 2009: Information Visualization in a 2.0 World

I've been too busy this year to attend conferences, so sadly, I missed the IEEE VisWeek 2009 conference that was held in October in Atlantic City, NJ.  The VisWeek program included members of three related IEEE groups,  IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis),  IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), and IEEE Visualization (Vis).  

I was hoping to include a range of videos and graphics in this post, but  decided that it would be best if I devoted a few future posts to information visualization when I had time to select the best digital representations of this vibrant and exciting field.  

I've organized this post by presenting descriptions of the three IEEE groups that participated in the VisWeek conference, and then highlighting the various panels, workshops, tutorials, and paper presentations that I would have attended.   There were many more topics that caught my attention than I have time to share in this post.  I promise to dig deeper and include stories about  about the people behind the data and information, along with their work, in future posts
The descriptions below were taken from the Vis 09 website:
IEEE InfoVis
"Computer-based information visualization centers around helping people explore or explain abstract data through interactive software that exploits the capabilities of the human perceptual system. A key challenge in information visualization is designing cognitively useful spatial mappings of abstract datasets that are not inherently spatial, and accompanying the mappings with interaction techniques that allow people to intuitively explore the data. Information visualization draws on the intellectual history of several traditions, including computer graphics, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, graphic design, statistical graphics, cartography, and art. The synthesis of relevant ideas from these fields with new methodologies and techniques made possible by interactive computation are critical for helping people keep pace with the torrents of information confronting them."

"IEEE VAST is the science of analytical reasoning supported by highly interactive visual interfaces. People use visual analytics tools and techniques to synthesize information into knowledge; derive insight from massive, dynamic, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments; and communicate assessments effectively for action."
"Visual Analytics requires interdisciplinary science, going beyond traditional scientific and information visualization to include statistics, mathematics, knowledge representation, management and discovery technologies, cognitive and perceptual sciences, decision sciences, and more. Your submission should help develop and/or apply the science of Visual Analytics, clearly showing an interdisciplinary approach."
"IEEE Vis is the premier forum for visualization advances in science and engineering for academia, government, and industry. This event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in techniques, tools, and technology. The year 2009 marks the20th anniversary of IEEE Vis and it will celebrate the maturation of visualization into an established scientific discipline."

Here are the workshops, panels, and paper presentations I would have attended if I was at the VisWeek conference: 

Changing the World with Visualization

Organizer: Robert Kosara

 Sarah Cohen, Jerome Cukier,  Marten Wattenberg

"With large amounts of data becoming available, and being accessible more easily,  visualization has to step in to provide means to explore and understand that data.  How can we enable people to explore the data that is of importance to them?  how can we present data in a way that is not detached, but rather prompts a reaction (but yet does not distort the data)? How can visualization change the world (and what good is it if it cannot)?  And how do we do all that so it still has academic value?"

(Note: Robert Kosara was my Info Visualization and Visual Communication professor at UNC-Charlotte.  He is the author of the Eager Eyes website and blog. He has great links related to his passions.)

Putting Visualization on the Web

Organizers:  Robert Kosara, Nathan Yau, Andrew Van de Moere

"The World Wide Web is a primary source of information for many people, but not everything that can be found online when searching for "visualization" would be recognized as such by VisWeek attendees.  there is clearly a place for data art, information graphics, mash-ups, etc. -- but what is generally considered the core for visualization research (or visual analytics, for that matter) seems underrepresented.  And while it is not difficult to find images of many techniques, there is little material that explains, demonstrates, compares, and critiques them. All this is even more true for scientific visualization than for information visualization.  To reach more people in the real world, we need to understand the mechanisms for disseminating knowledge outside of the conference or journal paper. A few examples exist where academic visualization research has become successfully poipularized, e.g., TreeMaps, ThemeRiver (used in last.fm), StreamGraphs (a well-received New York Times chart of box office revenues).  More examples like these are clearly needed, as is more open and accessible information from the people in the field.  A blog or website is not just a place for dispensing wisdom, it can provide a platform for experiments and interaction.  It also makes it possible to get feedback from readers about real-world problems that might be tackled in research projects.  And it can even become the subject of research;  Many Eyes is a wonderful example of this.  The proposed workshop will give participants the opportunity to learn about experiences, get hints, and discuss issues.  Such issues include academic blogging (talk about research before it is published?),  finding an audience,  promoting a site, etc.  The goal of the workshop is to collect ideas and best practices, and to come up with useful solutions to problems posed."
Comment: The topics covered in the two workshop listed above interest me, since I get so much information from the web, and I particularly enjoy taking in information visually, especially if it conveys meaning in an efficient, elegant way.  In my opinion, web-based information "social" information visualization has the potential to embed the human story behind the numbers, trends, and factoids that bombard us every day.   This is not simply "information overload".  It is information numbness.   As consequence, it is sometimes difficult for us to tell the difference between what is important or essential, what is true, and what is not.   
VisWeek Workshop: Video Analytics

Organizers:  Nancy Chinchor, William Ribarsky, Michael Christel

"The workshop will focus on tools for analyzing videos whose content ranges from persuasive videos (ads, propaganda, news) to YouTube videos. The purpose of video analysis is to gain insight into the contents of large collections of video and to focus detailed analysis on a smaller set of videos out of that collection. The capability to explore, categorize, and annotate videos is required by multiple types of analysts. User interfaces and techniques that support these activities including techniques in image processing are all central concerns of this workshop. However, the workshop goes beyond retrieval of images to interacting with a large video collection that one may have received from a query." 

(Note:  Dr. Ribarsky is the director of the Charlotte Visualization Center.  "The VisCenter leads the latter effort through the development of the Renaissance Situation Room, located in the VisCenter, which includes a multi-touch table, tiled display, immersive stereoscopic environment, and integrated interaction for all these tools. New interactive visualizations of the urban growth model and related models are displayed and used within this environment." RENCI at UNCC )

Comment I thought this would be an interesting workshop, because as a school psychologist, I use digital video in my work with students who have special needs, including severe autism.  As a consequence, I have an assortment of digital video files to analyse, organize, and retrieve. I need some tools to help me do this in an efficient and meaningful way.  I work with a team of people, and making this information easy for my colleagues to access and share would be important to me. Collaborative Visualization on Interactive Surfaces (CoVIS) Organizers: Petra Isenberg, Michael Sedlmair, Dominikus Baur, Tobias Isenberg, Andreas Butz "It is common for small groups of people to gather around visual displays of information to discuss or interpret the information to form decisions.  Groups can share the task load of exploring large and complex datasets and can share various interpretations of a dataset when working together.  However, tools to support synchronous collaboration between several people in their data analysis are still relatively scarce.  Traditionally,  visualization and visual analytics tools have been designed from a single-user perspective and for desktop computers.  While hardware such as multi-touch displays and network capabilities have emerged that lend themselves especially well to collaboration, software support for collaboration around visualizations is still relatively scarce.  One of the reasons is that single user systems do not necessarily translate well to collaborative scenarios or interactive surfaces and require specific re-design.  The design of digital systems, therefore, poses additional challenges:  we need to understand (a) how people collaboratively work with visual representations of data and which methods they use to solve information analysis tasks as a team, and (b) what the exact design requirements are for collaborative visual analysis scenarios.  In this workshop we would like to discuss these challenges and discuss the role of interactive surfaces as an emerging technology for supporting collaborative visualization and visual analytics settings." Comment If I was at VisWeek, I'd attend this workshop because I've been thinking about topic for a while. One idea I've been toying with is the concept of sharable data widgets that people could use at the table to do real-time data analysis, as well as capture real-time data from external sources (such as information from outdoor videocams, motion sensors, etc.), and data sent from colleagues who are remotely located.  This would allow people to work collaboratively as a group, but also provide a means to distribute some of the data analysis tasks during the session.   VizWeek Tutorial:  Exploring Design Decisions for Effective Information Visualization Organizers: Jo Wood, Jason Dykes, Aldan Slingsby "This tutorial provides an opportunity for participants to design their own information visualization of some sample datasets. Using interactive software and data provided by the instructors, issues of color, layout, symbolization and animation are explored. Results from participants’ visualizations are compared along with those from the presenters allowing insights into the data and good practice in information visualization design to be gained. Participants should be equipped with their own laptop capable of running Java applications. Prior to the session participants are strongly encouraged to download the free software and data that will be used in the tutorial. The tutorial is suitable for anyone working with complex datasets who wishes to improve their data visualization design skills, in particular designing visualization solutions that match the research questions asked and the data to be analyzed." Comment This workshop caught my eye because it provides an opportunity to participate in hands-on visualization activities.   There are plenty of free educational, mental health, and public health data sets that I'd like to play around with, if I had the time and the tools! VAST Capstone Panel: How Interactive Visualization Can Assist Investigative Analysis:  Views and Perspectives from Domain Experts Organizer:  John Stasko Panelists:  Sarah Cohen, Lawrence Hunter, Joe Parry "Interactive visualization could become an essential tool in the work of investigative analysts.  Visualization could help analysts to explore large collections of data and documents, supporting the analysts' investigative sense-making processes.  This panel gathers recognized leaders  from three important domains,  investigative reporting, biosciences (genomics), and intelligence analysis, all that include a fundamental investigative analysis component.  The panelists will provide a glimpse into their worlds, describing and illustrating the data they examine, the goals and methods of their analysts, and the culture of their respective professions.  In particular, the panelists will explore how visualization could potentially benefit investigators from their domain and they will provide guidance for visualization researchers seeking to collaborate with their colleagues." Comment: I think that the topics covered by this panel are important.  Much of the important work that needs to be done by computer scientists and related technologists is interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.   More disciplines rely on technology than ever before, and this is not limited to academia.    In my opinion,  I think the research and statistics courses that are mandatory for most graduate students should also include content related to information and data visualization related to the domain.  Often these research and statistics courses are taught by domain experts who also specialize in research and statistics. Why not take it to the next level?! The IEEE Visualization & Graphics Community website has links to most of the VisWeek 2009 conference abstracts.  There are some videos and slides available on-line.  Here are a few more topics that I thought were interesting: FinVis: Applied Visual Analytics for Personal Financial Planning (pdf) Stephen Rudolph, Anya C. Savikhin, David S. Ebert,  Purdue University Connecting the Dots in Visual Analysis (pdf) Yedendra B. Shrinivasan, Eindhoven University of Technology;  David Goetz, Jie Lu, IBM Research  Proximity-based Visualization of Movement Trace Data (pdf) Tarik Crnovrsanin, Chris Muelder, Carlos Correa, Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California, Davis Visual Analysis of Graphs with Multiple Connected Components (pdf) T. von Landesberger, M.Gorner, T. Schreck,  Technische Universitat Darmstadt I'm marking my calendar and hoping I'll have the opportunity to attend the 2010 conference: IEEE VisWeek 2010 Salt Lake City, Utah October 24-29, 2010

White House Blog: Interactive Debategraph for Open Government Transparency.

Infoviz for Government!

I came across the following graphic of the interactive "Debategraph" from the White House Blog:



When you visit the Debategraph website, you can click on each item to see things reconfigured according to your selection. You can link to the site by clicking on the above graphic.

According to the Whitehouse Blog post, "Debategraph is a visual policy mapping tool that is being used for running citizen engagement on climate change in Europe. Debategraph translated our mindmap of the redacted transparency proposals into the interactive Debategraph. In this format, the different proposals are rateable, addressable, and open to collaborative editing. People can also add supporting and opposing arguments to the proposals. "The aim with visual policy maps of this kind is to collaboratively weave together all of the salient proposals and arguments dispersed through the community into a single rich, transparent structure—in which each idea and argument is expressed just once—so that anyone can explore quickly and gain a good sense of the perceived merits of the relevant choices," says David Price, Debategraph's co-founder."

How soon will we see interactive information visualization for multi-touch & gesture systems?

The field of information visualization is growing. Until recently, most visualizations were created for use on a single PC or larger screen, allowing for interaction by only one user at a time. I have a feeling that this will be changing in the very near future.

Why? Interactive duo and multi-touch interfaces are becoming more common, and now come in all sizes of screens, from the iPhone, the Surface, and CNN's multi-touch "Magic Wall". People of all ages play interactive games on the Wii, often on large flat-panel displays. In my opinion, the time is right for those developing applications for the InfoViz world to think about harnessing the power of multi-touch.

Below is a picture of the front page of the Visual Complexity website. If you go to the site, you can select a visualization, and then explore it more in detail, as each picture links to a web-page that provides background information about the visualization project, the artist or team behind the project, and links to the project's website.

I took a look at a variety of the examples posted on the Information Complexity website, and think many would be enhanced by a transformation to a multi-touch, gesture, bi-manual, or duo/multi user system. I'm interested in learning what others think about this. If you are working on a collaborative information visualization project, feel free to add a comment and post a link.

Here is a a nice quote from the website:

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans." Matt Woolman Digital Information Graphics

Update: I did a search for "multi-touch" on the Visual Complexity website and found a couple of interactive applications:

Reactable (I've posted about this system a few times!)
(Reactable website)

Prototouch

(Wirmachenbunt Website)

Interactive Data Visualization Online: NY Times Examples

All of Inflation's Little Parts

This interactive data visualization can be found in the on-line version of the New York Times.










This is what you see in the zoom view.













For those of you interested in sports data, here an interactive chart about Tiger Woods:

How Woods Wins a Major







If you look closely, the data that relates from the various years is brushed to a fader shade. By clicking on various years, you can look at patterns and trends in the data, and see how Tiger did in the various areas.












Links via Ranjit S. Mathoda: When will blogs start presenting data using interactive visuals alongside their stories?

Update 6/3/08: Another InfoGraphic from the New York Times, via Randy Krum:

Cross- Post: Visualizations: Telling a Story with Data -Making an Impact

More information about this topic can be found on the TechPsych blog: Visualizations: Telling a Story with Data-Making an Impact.

I posted a video of Hans Rosling's TED 2006 presentation using data visualizations, and Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod's "Do You Know: Shift Happens" revision of a presentation originally designed for a high school faculty that "went viral" after it was uploaded to the Internet.

If you have not yet seen these two videos, you'll need to set aside about 30 minutes to view them, and more, if you want to stop the video and reflect for a moment or two.

MYTHS ABOUT THE DEVELOPING WORLD




DID YOU KNOW? SHIFT HAPPENS