The Impact of Microsoft Research Hotmap

One of the first entries in the VizWeek Discovery Exhibition is live, and it’s from none other than Microsoft Research.  The team behind the “Hotmap” tool, which tracks usage of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, released a report detailing how they’ve used their results.  They detail three main benefits:

1. Documenting Usage – Detailed documentation of where users look can be used to determine where to spent money on newer, higher-resolution maps, leading to a more effective allocation of funds in the project.
2. Documenting Errors – The usage shows strange spikes that can be traced to unusual errors, such as the high occurance of viewers looking at (0,0), off the coast of Africa.
3. Documenting Attacks – Strange access patterns, such as a faint squarish area over China, show attempts to scrape data that can then be prevented.

It’s a great read, and the full PDF is available on the Discovery Week website.

via Infovis Discovery Exhibition: The Impact of Microsoft Research Hotmap – information aesthetics.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.