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Information Aesthetics wraps up VisWeek2009 with a nice recap of some of the award-winning and honored papers, as well as the keynotes.

This year just over 800 people met in Atlantic City, USA to discuss, present, or listen to recent research on all kinds of visualization related topics. If you want to skip our summary and see the “raw data”, check out the videos captured of workshops, tutorials, panels, and paper talks. For a summary of our – of course highly subjective – experience, please read on.

If you’re into VisWeek information, then be sure to read VizWorld’s coverage of the event here.

via IEEE VisWeek 2009 Conference: Best-Of Recap – information aesthetics.

Science conference, visweek

I found this over on FailBlog, which typically isn’t a source of great visualization material.  However, this poll result from the Washington Post has so many errors, I had to post it.

At first glance, it seems that there’s an overwhelming “yes”, as evidenced by the red bar.  But look closely at the percentages inside the bars, and you see they are both 50% .  Look closely at the legend across the bottom, and the entire legend is 50%.  What this really means is that the results (once you account for a reasonable margin of error) are essentially equal, roughly 49.9% vs 50.1%.

At a panel this week at VisWeek, “Changing the World with Visualization”, Sarah Cohen made the comment that they typically don’t label charts very well because they aren’t expected to leave the newsroom.  Evidently this one snuck out.

Online Poll Fail « FAIL Blog: Epic Fail Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments.

Science bad, poll, visweek, washingtonpost

Tuesday afternoon I attended the second half of the Advanced ParaView Tutorial lead by researchers from  Kitware, Sandia National Labs, and Los Alamos National Labs.  They talked about some of the in-research projects they’re working on and gave demonstrations of things you can see in the latest CVS (if you enable them specifically).  While not ready for prime-time, they showed alot of new functionality that I think ParaView users world-wide will find useful.

Read up after the break.
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Science feature, paraview, software, tutorial, visweek

Biologists out there might want to take a look at the open-source MizBee visualization tool.

MizBee is a multiscale synteny browser for exploring conservation relationships in comparative genomics data. Using side-by-side linked views, MizBee enables efficient data browsing across a range of scales, from the genome to the gene. The design of MizBee is grounded in perceptual principles, and includes several techniques such as edge bundling and layering to enhance visual cues about conservation relationships related to proximity, size, similarity, and orientation.

It uses a dual-ring visualization where the outer ring is source chromosomes, and the inner ring is destination chromosomes.  It’s difficult to explain, so just head on over to their site and watch the quicktime demonstration video.

via Overview.

Science biomed, genome, mizbee, software, visweek

On Monday afternoon I attended the VisIt Tutorial, taught by the ever-knowledgeable Sean Ahern and Hank Childs. The tutorial covered all the major parts you could hope for: Basic usage, advanced functionality, expressions, client-server, analysis, and finally development.  I thought I’ld cover some of the highlights for you in case you couldn’t make it yourself.

Read the review after the break.

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Science feature, software, tutorial, visit, visweek

Here at VisWeek, Tableau Software’s Director of Visual Analysis Jock Mackinlay was awarded the IEEE 2009 Visualization Technical Achievement Award for his work on automatic presentation tools and visual metaphors for visualization.

“Selecting just one person to be honored with the Visualization Technical Achievement Award is always difficult for the Awards Committee because there are many worthy contributors,” said Bill Lorensen, Chair of the IEEE VGTC Awards Committee. “Jock’s work developing automatic presentation tools and creating new metaphors for information visualization impressed the committee deeply. He was a natural choice for this honor.”

via Tableau Software’s Jock Mackinlay Honored with IEEE 2009 Visualization Technical Achievement Award.

Science award, tableau, visweek

Anya Savikhin and Stephen Rudolph presented their “FinVis” product, available for free on Google Code and developed on grant from the NSF, at VisWeek.  The talk was good, but it’s being berated a bit in the Q&A.  The tool looks promising, but very early in development.  What do you think?

PDF Paper

Google Code Page

Science finvis, nsf, visweek

Equilibrium Networks is in attendance at VisWeek for the SecVis talks, presenting a poster and talking to people.  They’ve got a writeup of the event on their blog and they discuss the possibility of a “scientific theory of security”.

One thing I was pleasantly not surprised by is that the afternoon panel seemed to repudiate the notional equation “Security + Visualization = Science”. As I’ve commented here and there, there can be no truly scientific theory of security. Visualization doesn’t change this. The place where security and visualization can overlap with each other and with science is in the development of frameworks guided by scientific principles, both in architectural and cognitive aspects.

via VizSec09 « Equilibrium Networks.

Science equilibrium, secvis, visweek

An interesting paper presented here at VisWeek, as part of VAST, comes from Christopher Collins Research.  They parsed a database of 600,000 US Circuit Court decisions over 50 years and created a text-visualization tool they call “Parallel Tag Clouds”.

The visualization technique combines graphical elements from parallel coordinates and traditional tag clouds to provide rich overviews of a document collection while acting as an entry point for exploration of individual texts. We augment basic parallel tag clouds with a details-in-context display and an option to visualize changes over a second facet of the data, such as time. We also address text mining challenges such as selecting the best words to visualize, and how to do so in reasonable time periods to maintain interactivity.

The full paper is available at their site.  See their demonstration video after the break.

via Christopher Collins: Research.

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Science paper, research, tag clouds, visweek

I’m currently in a talk from a research at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) who is talking about two algorithms for mesh cache management, and you might want to check them out.  First is OpenCCL from UNC Chapel Hill:

We have designed a novel algorithm to compute cache-oblivious layouts of data elements to minimize the access time of applications on the layouts. Our algorithm only requires an input graph that represents runtime access patterns of an application on the data elements. Our algorithm probabilistically measures the expected number of cache misses of a layout and computes a cache-oblivious layout that minimizes the expected number of cache misses. Moreover, the cache-oblivious layout is not optimized for any particular cache, block sizes, or replacement policies; it is constructed to work well under any cache parameters.

The other is OpenRACM from LLNL and KAIST:

OpenRACM constructs random-accessble compressed triangle meshes, which can be used for runtime applications without decompressing the whole mesh. Moreover, OpenRACM library provides a general mesh access API. Through the API, user can tranparently access the compressed meshes without application-level data management. OpenRACM compresses an input mesh in the order that triangles appear in the mesh.

Using these he’s shown compressing a 20GB dataset down to 1GB, small enough to fit into main memory, and some fantastic real-time raytracing visualizations of the St Matthew dataset.

via OpenCCL: Cache-Coherent Layouts of Meshes and Graphs.

Science algorithm, mesh, visweek