VisWeek 2009 is underway here in sunny Atlantic City, New Jersey and VizWorld is here covering the event. Be sure to check back here often for new stories and reports, and stop on by the Forums to discuss the conference with your colleagues.
The website for VisWeek 2012 is now online, with all the dates and deadlines you’ll need for the event this year happening in Seattle.
VisWeek 2012 is the premier forum for advances in scientific and information visualization. The event-packed week brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to explore their shared interests in tools, techniques, and technology. We invite you to participate in IEEE Visualization, IEEE Information Visualization, and IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology by sharing your research, insights, experience, and enthusiasm.
The data for the annual Vis Contest will be online next month, and Paper Abstracts are due in March.
Robert Kosara, EagerEyes, has posted his VisWeek roundup. He takes a bit of a different view than others, focusing on the work this year in validation & verification of visualization techniques, like the work done by Michelle Borkin in medical visualizations:
Michelle Borkin presented fascinating work on the use of colormaps in the diagnosis of coronary heart disease. Their 2D representations using perceptually uniform colormaps led to significantly fewer errors than the usual 3D representations and/or the dreaded rainbow colormap.
I also like his bit about a “Hippocratic Oath” of visualization, the classic “do no harm”.
Kim Rees has a great article on many of the papers at VisWeek, focusing mostly on the ones in the InfoVis track.
While many of the research was focused on trying to “do something better,” there was one paper that presented a novel, new type of data visualization. GestaltLines (PDF) by Ulrik Brandes and Nick Bobo of the University of Konstanz used balance to visualize dyadic relationships. Even in its most basic form, a ‘Gestaltline’ shows type, extent, and time of the relationship. Color is left as a degree of freedom to encode other variables. Using a sparkline or multivariate glyph approach, a gestaltline can easily be placed within text as a dataword. The technique seems like a very intuitive way of viewing relationships.
He includes PDF’s to the papers that he can (a welcome addition that I’m adding to my Evernote collection right now), and also covers some of the Visweek flops.
IEEE VisWeek 2011 is underway up in Rhode Island, with all the usual players onsite and tweeting, blogging, and updating as fast as their 3G and WiFi connections will allow. Early indications show it going well (aside from a common cough/cold pervading many). Here’s some early reports and folks to watch:
“Telling Stories with Data” - Notes from a pair of UNCC Grad Students about the continuing track on narrative viz
VAST Challenge 2011 - Notes from the same on this year’s VAST Challenge entries
If you’re looking for individuals to following, I always recommend @dr_tj, a Bulldog like myself with great insights into InfoVis, and the always-fascinating @eagereyes Robert Kosara.
If you happen to be in Rhode Island this week for IEEE VisWeek, flag down a Kitware developer and check out their latest foray into OpenGL ES 2.0 support with “VES”. Already at the core of their iPad app “KiwiViewer”, they’ve been busily working on it adding lots of features.
And so, here we are, iterating on our code at high speed to prepare demos for VisWeek. Last week I added support for 2D text annotations using VTK’s freetype classes. The annotations can be anchored to 3D points on a mesh, allowing for updated annotation positions as the camera moves around the scene. This feature was demonstrated in the demo video linked above.
The video also shows some impressive slicing and mesh clipping, adding in new degrees of interactivity with your data. Once they get the Animation support added in, this could be a great way to “share” your data with others in a tight setting.
Robert Kosara and his student Aritra Dasgupta are presenting a paper next week at InfoVis on something most people would consider contrary to classic Vis: How to obscure information.
The point of visualization is usually to reveal as much of the structure of a dataset as possible. But what if the data is sensitive or proprietary, and the person doing the analysis is not supposed to be able to know everything about it? In a paper to be presented next week at InfoVis, my Ph.D. student Aritra Dasgupta and I describe the issues involved in privacy-preserving visualization, and propose a variation of parallel coordinates that controls the amount of information shown to the user.
The first IEEE Symposium of BioVis is gearing up to rock Providence, Rhode Island next month along with the rest of VisWeek, and their website now shows the selected list of papers, abstracts, and keynotes. But if you want to go, you need to move quickly because the early registration period ends next Friday.
Early registration (reduced rate) for this meeting ends on Friday, 16 September. Single day and two day registrations are available in addition to full week registration. Discounts are available for ISCB, IEEE and ACM members, details are can be found on the registration page.
The goal of BioVis is to create the premier international and interdisciplinary event for all aspects of visualization in biology. This symposium will bring together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in biological data visualization, as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research. As the first annual BioVis Symposium, this event seeks to emphasize inclusion and interaction between these communities as its primary impact.
a keynote by Lynda Chin (MD Anderson Cancer Center / Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard)
a primer by Lawrence Hunter (UC Denver) and Kun Huang (Ohio State)
a special session on challenges in biological data visualization with invited speakers Arthur Olson (The Scripps Research Institute), Cydney Nielsen (BC Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre) and Willy Supatto (California Institute of Technology)
four paper sessions with 24 presentations from all areas of biology
27 posters and demos
presentation of the results from the BioVis Contest
If SIGGRAPH isn’t technical enough for you, then you’re in for a treat as Visweek2011 has just opened Registration. Visweek is the new combination of IEEE Visualization, IEEE InfoVis, and IEEE VAST, all in one week-long visualization extravaganza.
They have all the usual hotel rates, visa assistance, and travel options on their site as well.
There’s a new viz conference on this horizon this year, Sponsored by IEEE and co-located with IEEE VisWeek. This year will mark the 1st IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization.
BioVis 2011 – the 1st IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization – aims at bringing together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue and to promote the sharing of expertise, between both meeting participants and the communities at large. The meeting is intended to educate, inspire, and engage visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization, as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research.
Looks like VisWeek is gonna be a doozy this year, bringing BioVis, InfoVis, VAST, and IEEE Vis alltogether in one place (along with the usual surrounding mini-conferences).
Submission deadline for papers is April 30th. Full details are on their site.
Infosthetics brings us a new method of visualizing large genealogy databases that was presented at Visweek this year. The original paper (download, view online) presents a method that can map thousands of individuals into a diagonal matrix view, with patterns indicating many interesting family structures.
Genealogies are represented in the form of a layered, diagonally-filled matrix, which eliminates crossings and accommodates very large datasets in the order of thousands of individuals. By depicting individuals as rows and families as columns, with parents always at a higher layer (generation) than their children, the visualization exhibits marriage and parent/children relationships, as well as other interesting relationships such as cross-generational and consanguine marriages.
If you just look at the sample chart above (of greek gods), you may not fully understand it. Watch the video below for a much better explanation.
VisWeek 2009 is underway here in sunny Atlantic City, New Jersey and VizWorld is here covering the event. Be sure to check back here often for new stories and reports, and stop on by the 
The website for VisWeek 2012 is now online, with all the dates and deadlines you’ll need for the event this year happening in Seattle.
Robert Kosara, EagerEyes, has posted his VisWeek roundup. He takes a bit of a different view than others, focusing on the work this year in validation & verification of visualization techniques, like the work done by Michelle Borkin in medical visualizations:
Kim Rees has a great article on many of the papers at VisWeek, focusing mostly on the ones in the InfoVis track.
If you happen to be in Rhode Island this week for IEEE VisWeek, flag down a Kitware developer and check out their latest foray into OpenGL ES 2.0 support with “VES”. Already at the core of their iPad app “KiwiViewer”, they’ve been busily working on it adding lots of features.
Robert Kosara and his student Aritra Dasgupta are presenting a paper next week at InfoVis on something most people would consider contrary to classic Vis: How to obscure information.
The first IEEE Symposium of BioVis is gearing up to rock Providence, Rhode Island next month along with the rest of VisWeek, and their website now shows the selected list of papers, abstracts, and keynotes. But if you want to go, you need to move quickly because the early registration period ends next Friday.
There’s a new viz conference on this horizon this year, Sponsored by IEEE and co-located with IEEE VisWeek. This year will mark the 1st IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization.
VizWorld.com 
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