Conference stringclasses 6 values | Year int64 1.99k 2.03k | Title stringlengths 8 187 | DOI stringlengths 16 32 | Abstract stringlengths 128 7.15k ⌀ | Accessible bool 2 classes | Early bool 2 classes | AuthorNames-Deduped listlengths 1 24 | Award listlengths 0 2 | Resources listlengths 0 5 | ResourceLinks listlengths 0 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
InfoVis | 2,014 | How Hierarchical Topics Evolve in Large Text Corpora | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346433 | Using a sequence of topic trees to organize documents is a popular way to represent hierarchical and evolving topics in text corpora. However, following evolving topics in the context of topic trees remains difficult for users. To address this issue, we present an interactive visual text analysis approach to allow users to progressively explore and analyze the complex evolutionary patterns of hierarchical topics. The key idea behind our approach is to exploit a tree cut to approximate each tree and allow users to interactively modify the tree cuts based on their interests. In particular, we propose an incremental evolutionary tree cut algorithm with the goal of balancing 1) the fitness of each tree cut and the smoothness between adjacent tree cuts; 2) the historical and new information related to user interests. A time-based visualization is designed to illustrate the evolving topics over time. To preserve the mental map, we develop a stable layout algorithm. As a result, our approach can quickly guide users to progressively gain profound insights into evolving hierarchical topics. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and real-world news data. The results show that users are able to successfully analyze evolving topics in text data. | false | false | [
"Weiwei Cui",
"Shixia Liu",
"Zhuofeng Wu 0002",
"Hao Wei"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | iVisDesigner: Expressive Interactive Design of Information Visualizations | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346291 | We present the design, implementation and evaluation of iVisDesigner, a web-based system that enables users to design information visualizations for complex datasets interactively, without the need for textual programming. Our system achieves high interactive expressiveness through conceptual modularity, covering a broad information visualization design space. iVisDesigner supports the interactive design of interactive visualizations, such as provisioning for responsive graph layouts and different types of brushing and linking interactions. We present the system design and implementation, exemplify it through a variety of illustrative visualization designs and discuss its limitations. A performance analysis and an informal user study are presented to evaluate the system. | false | false | [
"Donghao Ren",
"Tobias Höllerer",
"Xiaoru Yuan"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Learning Perceptual Kernels for Visualization Design | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346978 | Visualization design can benefit from careful consideration of perception, as different assignments of visual encoding variables such as color, shape and size affect how viewers interpret data. In this work, we introduce perceptual kernels: distance matrices derived from aggregate perceptual judgments. Perceptual kernels represent perceptual differences between and within visual variables in a reusable form that is directly applicable to visualization evaluation and automated design. We report results from crowd-sourced experiments to estimate kernels for color, shape, size and combinations thereof. We analyze kernels estimated using five different judgment types-including Likert ratings among pairs, ordinal triplet comparisons, and manual spatial arrangement-and compare them to existing perceptual models. We derive recommendations for collecting perceptual similarities, and then demonstrate how the resulting kernels can be applied to automate visualization design decisions. | false | false | [
"Çagatay Demiralp",
"Michael S. Bernstein",
"Jeffrey Heer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | LiveGantt: Interactively Visualizing a Large Manufacturing Schedule | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346454 | In this paper, we introduce LiveGantt as a novel interactive schedule visualization tool that helps users explore highly-concurrent large schedules from various perspectives. Although a Gantt chart is the most common approach to illustrate schedules, currently available Gantt chart visualization tools suffer from limited scalability and lack of interactions. LiveGantt is built with newly designed algorithms and interactions to improve conventional charts with better scalability, explorability, and reschedulability. It employs resource reordering and task aggregation to display the schedules in a scalable way. LiveGantt provides four coordinated views and filtering techniques to help users explore and interact with the schedules in more flexible ways. In addition, LiveGantt is equipped with an efficient rescheduler to allow users to instantaneously modify their schedules based on their scheduling experience in the fields. To assess the usefulness of the application of LiveGantt, we conducted a case study on manufacturing schedule data with four industrial engineering researchers. Participants not only grasped an overview of a schedule but also explored the schedule from multiple perspectives to make enhancements. | false | false | [
"Jaemin Jo",
"Jaeseok Huh",
"Jonghun Park",
"Bo Hyoung Kim",
"Jinwook Seo"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | MovExp: A Versatile Visualization Tool for Human-Computer Interaction Studies with 3D Performance and Biomechanical Data | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346311 | In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), experts seek to evaluate and compare the performance and ergonomics of user interfaces. Recently, a novel cost-efficient method for estimating physical ergonomics and performance has been introduced to HCI. It is based on optical motion capture and biomechanical simulation. It provides a rich source for analyzing human movements summarized in a multidimensional data set. Existing visualization tools do not sufficiently support the HCI experts in analyzing this data. We identified two shortcomings. First, appropriate visual encodings are missing particularly for the biomechanical aspects of the data. Second, the physical setup of the user interface cannot be incorporated explicitly into existing tools. We present MovExp, a versatile visualization tool that supports the evaluation of user interfaces. In particular, it can be easily adapted by the HCI experts to include the physical setup that is being evaluated, and visualize the data on top of it. Furthermore, it provides a variety of visual encodings to communicate muscular loads, movement directions, and other specifics of HCI studies that employ motion capture and biomechanical simulation. In this design study, we follow a problem-driven research approach. Based on a formalization of the visualization needs and the data structure, we formulate technical requirements for the visualization tool and present novel solutions to the analysis needs of the HCI experts. We show the utility of our tool with four case studies from the daily work of our HCI experts. | false | false | [
"Gregorio Palmas",
"Myroslav Bachynskyi",
"Antti Oulasvirta",
"Hans-Peter Seidel",
"Tino Weinkauf"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Moving beyond sequential design: Reflections on a rich multi-channel approach to data visualization | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346323 | We reflect on a four-year engagement with transport authorities and others involving a large dataset describing the use of a public bicycle-sharing scheme. We describe the role visualization of these data played in fostering engagement with policy makers, transport operators, the transport research community, the museum and gallery sector and the general public. We identify each of these as `channels'-evolving relationships between producers and consumers of visualization-where traditional roles of the visualization expert and domain expert are blurred. In each case, we identify the different design decisions that were required to support each of these channels and the role played by the visualization process. Using chauffeured interaction with a flexible visual analytics system we demonstrate how insight was gained by policy makers into gendered spatio-temporal cycle behaviors, how this led to further insight into workplace commuting activity, group cycling behavior and explanations for street navigation choice. We demonstrate how this supported, and was supported by, the seemingly unrelated development of narrative-driven visualization via TEDx, of the creation and the setting of an art installation and the curating of digital and physical artefacts. We assert that existing models of visualization design, of tool/technique development and of insight generation do not adequately capture the richness of parallel engagement via these multiple channels of communication. We argue that developing multiple channels in parallel opens up opportunities for visualization design and analysis by building trust and authority and supporting creativity. This rich, non-sequential approach to visualization design is likely to foster serendipity, deepen insight and increase impact. | false | false | [
"Jo Wood",
"Roger Beecham",
"Jason Dykes"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Multivariate Network Exploration and Presentation: From Detail to Overview via Selections and Aggregations | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346441 | Network data is ubiquitous; e-mail traffic between persons, telecommunication, transport and financial networks are some examples. Often these networks are large and multivariate, besides the topological structure of the network, multivariate data on the nodes and links is available. Currently, exploration and analysis methods are focused on a single aspect; the network topology or the multivariate data. In addition, tools and techniques are highly domain specific and require expert knowledge. We focus on the non-expert user and propose a novel solution for multivariate network exploration and analysis that tightly couples structural and multivariate analysis. In short, we go from Detail to Overview via Selections and Aggregations (DOSA): users are enabled to gain insights through the creation of selections of interest (manually or automatically), and producing high-level, infographic-style overviews simultaneously. Finally, we present example explorations on real-world datasets that demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for the exploration and understanding of multivariate networks where presentation of findings comes for free. | false | false | [
"Stef van den Elzen",
"Jarke J. van Wijk"
] | [
"BP"
] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | NeuroLines: A Subway Map Metaphor for Visualizing Nanoscale Neuronal Connectivity | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346312 | We present NeuroLines, a novel visualization technique designed for scalable detailed analysis of neuronal connectivity at the nanoscale level. The topology of 3D brain tissue data is abstracted into a multi-scale, relative distance-preserving subway map visualization that allows domain scientists to conduct an interactive analysis of neurons and their connectivity. Nanoscale connectomics aims at reverse-engineering the wiring of the brain. Reconstructing and analyzing the detailed connectivity of neurons and neurites (axons, dendrites) will be crucial for understanding the brain and its development and diseases. However, the enormous scale and complexity of nanoscale neuronal connectivity pose big challenges to existing visualization techniques in terms of scalability. NeuroLines offers a scalable visualization framework that can interactively render thousands of neurites, and that supports the detailed analysis of neuronal structures and their connectivity. We describe and analyze the design of NeuroLines based on two real-world use-cases of our collaborators in developmental neuroscience, and investigate its scalability to large-scale neuronal connectivity data. | false | false | [
"Ali K. Al-Awami",
"Johanna Beyer",
"Hendrik Strobelt",
"Narayanan Kasthuri",
"Jeff Lichtman",
"Hanspeter Pfister",
"Markus Hadwiger"
] | [
"HM"
] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Nmap: A Novel Neighborhood Preservation Space-filling Algorithm | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346276 | Space-filling techniques seek to use as much as possible the visual space to represent a dataset, splitting it into regions that represent the data elements. Amongst those techniques, Treemaps have received wide attention due to its simplicity, reduced visual complexity, and compact use of the available space. Several different Treemap algorithms have been proposed, however the core idea is the same, to divide the visual space into rectangles with areas proportional to some data attribute or weight. Although pleasant layouts can be effectively produced by the existing techniques, most of them do not take into account relationships that might exist between different data elements when partitioning the visual space. This violates the distance-similarity metaphor, that is, close rectangles do not necessarily represent similar data elements. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called Neighborhood Treemap (Nmap), that seeks to solve this limitation by employing a slice and scale strategy where the visual space is successively bisected on the horizontal or vertical directions and the bisections are scaled until one rectangle is defined per data element. Compared to the current techniques with the same similarity preservation goal, our approach presents the best results while being two to three orders of magnitude faster. The usefulness of Nmap is shown by two applications involving the organization of document collections and the construction of cartograms illustrating its effectiveness on different scenarios. | false | false | [
"Felipe S. L. G. Duarte",
"Fabio Sikansi",
"Francisco M. Fatore",
"Samuel G. Fadel",
"Fernando Vieira Paulovich"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Node, Node-Link, and Node-Link-Group Diagrams: An Evaluation | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346422 | Effectively showing the relationships between objects in a dataset is one of the main tasks in information visualization. Typically there is a well-defined notion of distance between pairs of objects, and traditional approaches such as principal component analysis or multi-dimensional scaling are used to place the objects as points in 2D space, so that similar objects are close to each other. In another typical setting, the dataset is visualized as a network graph, where related nodes are connected by links. More recently, datasets are also visualized as maps, where in addition to nodes and links, there is an explicit representation of groups and clusters. We consider these three Techniques, characterized by a progressive increase of the amount of encoded information: node diagrams, node-link diagrams and node-link-group diagrams. We assess these three types of diagrams with a controlled experiment that covers nine different tasks falling broadly in three categories: node-based tasks, network-based tasks and group-based tasks. Our findings indicate that adding links, or links and group representations, does not negatively impact performance (time and accuracy) of node-based tasks. Similarly, adding group representations does not negatively impact the performance of network-based tasks. Node-link-group diagrams outperform the others on group-based tasks. These conclusions contradict results in other studies, in similar but subtly different settings. Taken together, however, such results can have significant implications for the design of standard and domain snecific visualizations tools. | false | false | [
"Bahador Saket",
"Paolo Simonetto",
"Stephen G. Kobourov",
"Katy Börner"
] | [] | [
"P"
] | [
{
"name": "Paper Preprint",
"url": "http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.1911v1",
"icon": "paper"
}
] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | OnSet: A Visualization Technique for Large-scale Binary Set Data | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346249 | Visualizing sets to reveal relationships between constituent elements is a complex representational problem. Recent research presents several automated placement and grouping techniques to highlight connections between set elements. However, these techniques do not scale well for sets with cardinality greater than one hundred elements. We present OnSet, an interactive, scalable visualization technique for representing large-scale binary set data. The visualization technique defines a single, combined domain of elements for all sets, and models each set by the elements that it both contains and does not contain. OnSet employs direct manipulation interaction and visual highlighting to support easy identification of commonalities and differences as well as membership patterns across different sets of elements. We present case studies to illustrate how the technique can be successfully applied across different domains such as bio-chemical metabolomics and task and event scheduling. | false | false | [
"Ramik Sadana",
"Timothy Major",
"Alistair D. M. Dove",
"John T. Stasko"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Order of Magnitude Markers: An Empirical Study on Large Magnitude Number Detection | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346428 | In this paper we introduce Order of Magnitude Markers (OOMMs) as a new technique for number representation. The motivation for this work is that many data sets require the depiction and comparison of numbers that have varying orders of magnitude. Existing techniques for representation use bar charts, plots and colour on linear or logarithmic scales. These all suffer from related problems. There is a limit to the dynamic range available for plotting numbers, and so the required dynamic range of the plot can exceed that of the depiction method. When that occurs, resolving, comparing and relating values across the display becomes problematical or even impossible for the user. With this in mind, we present an empirical study in which we compare logarithmic, linear, scale-stack bars and our new markers for 11 different stimuli grouped into 4 different tasks across all 8 marker types. | false | false | [
"Rita Borgo",
"Joel Dearden",
"Mark W. Jones"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Origin-Destination Flow Data Smoothing and Mapping | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346271 | This paper presents a new approach to flow mapping that extracts inherent patterns from massive geographic mobility data and constructs effective visual representations of the data for the understanding of complex flow trends. This approach involves a new method for origin-destination flow density estimation and a new method for flow map generalization, which together can remove spurious data variance, normalize flows with control population, and detect high-level patterns that are not discernable with existing approaches. The approach achieves three main objectives in addressing the challenges for analyzing and mapping massive flow data. First, it removes the effect of size differences among spatial units via kernel-based density estimation, which produces a measurement of flow volume between each pair of origin and destination. Second, it extracts major flow patterns in massive flow data through a new flow sampling method, which filters out duplicate information in the smoothed flows. Third, it enables effective flow mapping and allows intuitive perception of flow patterns among origins and destinations without bundling or altering flow paths. The approach can work with both point-based flow data (such as taxi trips with GPS locations) and area-based flow data (such as county-to-county migration). Moreover, the approach can be used to detect and compare flow patterns at different scales or in relatively sparse flow datasets, such as migration for each age group. We evaluate and demonstrate the new approach with case studies of U.S. migration data and experiments with synthetic data. | false | false | [
"Diansheng Guo",
"Xi Zhu 0002"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Overview: The Design, Adoption, and Analysis of a Visual Document Mining Tool for Investigative Journalists | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346431 | For an investigative journalist, a large collection of documents obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request or a leak is both a blessing and a curse: such material may contain multiple newsworthy stories, but it can be difficult and time consuming to find relevant documents. Standard text search is useful, but even if the search target is known it may not be possible to formulate an effective query. In addition, summarization is an important non-search task. We present Overview, an application for the systematic analysis of large document collections based on document clustering, visualization, and tagging. This work contributes to the small set of design studies which evaluate a visualization system “in the wild”, and we report on six case studies where Overview was voluntarily used by self-initiated journalists to produce published stories. We find that the frequently-used language of “exploring” a document collection is both too vague and too narrow to capture how journalists actually used our application. Our iterative process, including multiple rounds of deployment and observations of real world usage, led to a much more specific characterization of tasks. We analyze and justify the visual encoding and interaction techniques used in Overview's design with respect to our final task abstractions, and propose generalizable lessons for visualization design methodology. | false | false | [
"Matthew Brehmer",
"Stephen Ingram",
"Jonathan Stray",
"Tamara Munzner"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | PanoramicData: Data Analysis through Pen & Touch | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346293 | Interactively exploring multidimensional datasets requires frequent switching among a range of distinct but inter-related tasks (e.g., producing different visuals based on different column sets, calculating new variables, and observing the interactions between sets of data). Existing approaches either target specific different problem domains (e.g., data-transformation or data-presentation) or expose only limited aspects of the general exploratory process; in either case, users are forced to adopt coping strategies (e.g., arranging windows or using undo as a mechanism for comparison instead of using side-by-side displays) to compensate for the lack of an integrated suite of exploratory tools. PanoramicData (PD) addresses these problems by unifying a comprehensive set of tools for visual data exploration into a hybrid pen and touch system designed to exploit the visualization advantages of large interactive displays. PD goes beyond just familiar visualizations by including direct UI support for data transformation and aggregation, filtering and brushing. Leveraging an unbounded whiteboard metaphor, users can combine these tools like building blocks to create detailed interactive visual display networks in which each visualization can act as a filter for others. Further, by operating directly on relational-databases, PD provides an approachable visual language that exposes a broad set of the expressive power of SQL including functionally complete logic filtering, computation of aggregates and natural table joins. To understand the implications of this novel approach, we conducted a formative user study with both data and visualization experts. The results indicated that the system provided a fluid and natural user experience for probing multi-dimensional data and was able to cover the full range of queries that the users wanted to pose. | false | false | [
"Emanuel Zgraggen",
"Robert C. Zeleznik",
"Steven Mark Drucker"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Ranking Visualizations of Correlation Using Weber's Law | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346979 | Despite years of research yielding systems and guidelines to aid visualization design, practitioners still face the challenge of identifying the best visualization for a given dataset and task. One promising approach to circumvent this problem is to leverage perceptual laws to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of a visualization design. Following previously established methodologies, we conduct a large scale (n = 1687) crowdsourced experiment to investigate whether the perception of correlation in nine commonly used visualizations can be modeled using Weber's law. The results of this experiment contribute to our understanding of information visualization by establishing that: (1) for all tested visualizations, the precision of correlation judgment could be modeled by Weber's law, (2) correlation judgment precision showed striking variation between negatively and positively correlated data, and (3) Weber models provide a concise means to quantify, compare, and rank the perceptual precision afforded by a visualization. | false | false | [
"Lane Harrison",
"Fumeng Yang",
"Steven Franconeri",
"Remco Chang"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Reinforcing Visual Grouping Cues to Communicate Complex Informational Structure | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346998 | In his book Multimedia Learning [7], Richard Mayer asserts that viewers learn best from imagery that provides them with cues to help them organize new information into the correct knowledge structures. Designers have long been exploiting the Gestalt laws of visual grouping to deliver viewers those cues using visual hierarchy, often communicating structures much more complex than the simple organizations studied in psychological research. Unfortunately, designers are largely practical in their work, and have not paused to build a complex theory of structural communication. If we are to build a tool to help novices create effective and well structured visuals, we need a better understanding of how to create them. Our work takes a first step toward addressing this lack, studying how five of the many grouping cues (proximity, color similarity, common region, connectivity, and alignment) can be effectively combined to communicate structured text and imagery from real world examples. To measure the effectiveness of this structural communication, we applied a digital version of card sorting, a method widely used in anthropology and cognitive science to extract cognitive structures. We then used tree edit distance to measure the difference between perceived and communicated structures. Our most significant findings are: 1) with careful design, complex structure can be communicated clearly; 2) communicating complex structure is best done with multiple reinforcing grouping cues; 3) common region (use of containers such as boxes) is particularly effective at communicating structure; and 4) alignment is a weak structural communicator. | false | false | [
"Juhee Bae",
"Benjamin Watson 0001"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Revisiting Bertin Matrices: New Interactions for Crafting Tabular Visualizations | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346279 | We present Bertifier, a web app for rapidly creating tabular visualizations from spreadsheets. Bertifier draws from Jacques Bertin's matrix analysis method, whose goal was to “simplify without destroying” by encoding cell values visually and grouping similar rows and columns. Although there were several attempts to bring this method to computers, no implementation exists today that is both exhaustive and accessible to a large audience. Bertifier remains faithful to Bertin's method while leveraging the power of today's interactive computers. Tables are formatted and manipulated through crossets, a new interaction technique for rapidly applying operations on rows and columns. We also introduce visual reordering, a semi-interactive reordering approach that lets users apply and tune automatic reordering algorithms in a WYSIWYG manner. Sessions with eight users from different backgrounds suggest that Bertifier has the potential to bring Bertin's method to a wider audience of both technical and non-technical users, and empower them with data analysis and communication tools that were so far only accessible to a handful of specialists.COMPUTER | false | false | [
"Charles Perin",
"Pierre Dragicevic",
"Jean-Daniel Fekete"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Stenomaps: Shorthand for shapes | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346274 | We address some of the challenges in representing spatial data with a novel form of geometric abstraction-the stenomap. The stenomap comprises a series of smoothly curving linear glyphs that each represent both the boundary and the area of a polygon. We present an efficient algorithm to automatically generate these open, C<sup>1</sup>-continuous splines from a set of input polygons. Feature points of the input polygons are detected using the medial axis to maintain important shape properties. We use dynamic programming to compute a planar non-intersecting spline representing each polygon's base shape. The results are stylised glyphs whose appearance may be parameterised and that offer new possibilities in the 'cartographic design space'. We compare our glyphs with existing forms of geometric schematisation and discuss their relative merits and shortcomings. We describe several use cases including the depiction of uncertain model data in the form of hurricane track forecasting; minimal ink thematic mapping; and the depiction of continuous statistical data. | false | false | [
"Arthur van Goethem",
"Andreas W. Reimer",
"Bettina Speckmann",
"Jo Wood"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | TenniVis: Visualization for Tennis Match Analysis | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346445 | Existing research efforts into tennis visualization have primarily focused on using ball and player tracking data to enhance professional tennis broadcasts and to aid coaches in helping their students. Gathering and analyzing this data typically requires the use of an array of synchronized cameras, which are expensive for non-professional tennis matches. In this paper, we propose TenniVis, a novel tennis match visualization system that relies entirely on data that can be easily collected, such as score, point outcomes, point lengths, service information, and match videos that can be captured by one consumer-level camera. It provides two new visualizations to allow tennis coaches and players to quickly gain insights into match performance. It also provides rich interactions to support ad hoc hypothesis development and testing. We first demonstrate the usefulness of the system by analyzing the 2007 Australian Open men's singles final. We then validate its usability by two pilot user studies where two college tennis coaches analyzed the matches of their own players. The results indicate that useful insights can quickly be discovered and ad hoc hypotheses based on these insights can conveniently be tested through linked match videos. | false | false | [
"Tom Polk",
"Jing Yang 0001",
"Yueqi Hu",
"Ye Zhao 0003"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | The Effects of Interactive Latency on Exploratory Visual Analysis | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346452 | To support effective exploration, it is often stated that interactive visualizations should provide rapid response times. However, the effects of interactive latency on the process and outcomes of exploratory visual analysis have not been systematically studied. We present an experiment measuring user behavior and knowledge discovery with interactive visualizations under varying latency conditions. We observe that an additional delay of 500ms incurs significant costs, decreasing user activity and data set coverage. Analyzing verbal data from think-aloud protocols, we find that increased latency reduces the rate at which users make observations, draw generalizations and generate hypotheses. Moreover, we note interaction effects in which initial exposure to higher latencies leads to subsequently reduced performance in a low-latency setting. Overall, increased latency causes users to shift exploration strategy, in turn affecting performance. We discuss how these results can inform the design of interactive analysis tools. | false | false | [
"Zhicheng Liu",
"Jeffrey Heer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | The Influence of Contour on Similarity Perception of Star Glyphs | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346426 | We conducted three experiments to investigate the effects of contours on the detection of data similarity with star glyph variations. A star glyph is a small, compact, data graphic that represents a multi-dimensional data point. Star glyphs are often used in small-multiple settings, to represent data points in tables, on maps, or as overlays on other types of data graphics. In these settings, an important task is the visual comparison of the data points encoded in the star glyph, for example to find other similar data points or outliers. We hypothesized that for data comparisons, the overall shape of a star glyph-enhanced through contour lines-would aid the viewer in making accurate similarity judgments. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three experiments. In our first experiment, we explored how the use of contours influenced how visualization experts and trained novices chose glyphs with similar data values. Our results showed that glyphs without contours make the detection of data similarity easier. Given these results, we conducted a second study to understand intuitive notions of similarity. Star glyphs without contours most intuitively supported the detection of data similarity. In a third experiment, we tested the effect of star glyph reference structures (i.e., tickmarks and gridlines) on the detection of similarity. Surprisingly, our results show that adding reference structures does improve the correctness of similarity judgments for star glyphs with contours, but not for the standard star glyph. As a result of these experiments, we conclude that the simple star glyph without contours performs best under several criteria, reinforcing its practice and popularity in the literature. Contours seem to enhance the detection of other types of similarity, e. g., shape similarity and are distracting when data similarity has to be judged. Based on these findings we provide design considerations regarding the use of contours and reference structures on star glyphs. | false | false | [
"Johannes Fuchs 0001",
"Petra Isenberg",
"Anastasia Bezerianos",
"Fabian Fischer 0001",
"Enrico Bertini"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | The Not-so-Staggering Effect of Staggered Animated Transitions on Visual Tracking | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346424 | Interactive visual applications often rely on animation to transition from one display state to another. There are multiple animation techniques to choose from, and it is not always clear which should produce the best visual correspondences between display elements. One major factor is whether the animation relies on staggering-an incremental delay in start times across the moving elements. It has been suggested that staggering may reduce occlusion, while also reducing display complexity and producing less overwhelming animations, though no empirical evidence has demonstrated these advantages. Work in perceptual psychology does show that reducing occlusion, and reducing inter-object proximity (crowding) more generally, improves performance in multiple object tracking. We ran simulations confirming that staggering can in some cases reduce crowding in animated transitions involving dot clouds (as found in, e.g., animated 2D scatterplots). We empirically evaluated the effect of two staggering techniques on tracking tasks, focusing on cases that should most favour staggering. We found that introducing staggering has a negligible, or even negative, impact on multiple object tracking performance. The potential benefits of staggering may be outweighed by strong costs: a loss of common-motion grouping information about which objects travel in similar paths, and less predictability about when any specific object would begin to move. Staggering may be beneficial in some conditions, but they have yet to be demonstrated. The present results are a significant step toward a better understanding of animation pacing, and provide direction for further research. | false | false | [
"Fanny Chevalier",
"Pierre Dragicevic",
"Steven Franconeri"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | The Persuasive Power of Data Visualization | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346419 | Data visualization has been used extensively to inform users. However, little research has been done to examine the effects of data visualization in influencing users or in making a message more persuasive. In this study, we present experimental research to fill this gap and present an evidence-based analysis of persuasive visualization. We built on persuasion research from psychology and user interfaces literature in order to explore the persuasive effects of visualization. In this experimental study we define the circumstances under which data visualization can make a message more persuasive, propose hypotheses, and perform quantitative and qualitative analyses on studies conducted to test these hypotheses. We compare visual treatments with data presented through barcharts and linecharts on the one hand, treatments with data presented through tables on the other, and then evaluate their persuasiveness. The findings represent a first step in exploring the effectiveness of persuasive visualization. | false | false | [
"Anshul Vikram Pandey",
"Anjali Manivannan",
"Oded Nov",
"Margaret Satterthwaite",
"Enrico Bertini"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | The relation between visualization size, grouping, and user performance | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346983 | In this paper we make the following contributions: (1) we describe how the grouping, quantity, and size of visual marks affects search time based on the results from two experiments; (2) we report how search performance relates to self-reported difficulty in finding the target for different display types; and (3) we present design guidelines based on our findings to facilitate the design of effective visualizations. Both Experiment 1 and 2 asked participants to search for a unique target in colored visualizations to test how the grouping, quantity, and size of marks affects user performance. In Experiment 1, the target square was embedded in a grid of squares and in Experiment 2 the target was a point in a scatterplot. Search performance was faster when colors were spatially grouped than when they were randomly arranged. The quantity of marks had little effect on search time for grouped displays (“pop-out”), but increasing the quantity of marks slowed reaction time for random displays. Regardless of color layout (grouped vs. random), response times were slowest for the smallest mark size and decreased as mark size increased to a point, after which response times plateaued. In addition to these two experiments we also include potential application areas, as well as results from a small case study where we report preliminary findings that size may affect how users infer how visualizations should be used. We conclude with a list of design guidelines that focus on how to best create visualizations based on grouping, quantity, and size of visual marks. | false | false | [
"Connor Gramazio",
"Karen B. Schloss",
"David H. Laidlaw"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Tree Colors: Color Schemes for Tree-Structured Data | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346277 | We present a method to map tree structures to colors from the Hue-Chroma-Luminance color model, which is known for its well balanced perceptual properties. The Tree Colors method can be tuned with several parameters, whose effect on the resulting color schemes is discussed in detail. We provide a free and open source implementation with sensible parameter defaults. Categorical data are very common in statistical graphics, and often these categories form a classification tree. We evaluate applying Tree Colors to tree structured data with a survey on a large group of users from a national statistical institute. Our user study suggests that Tree Colors are useful, not only for improving node-link diagrams, but also for unveiling tree structure in non-hierarchical visualizations. | false | false | [
"Martijn Tennekes",
"Edwin de Jonge"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | UpSet: Visualization of Intersecting Sets | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346248 | Understanding relationships between sets is an important analysis task that has received widespread attention in the visualization community. The major challenge in this context is the combinatorial explosion of the number of set intersections if the number of sets exceeds a trivial threshold. In this paper we introduce UpSet, a novel visualization technique for the quantitative analysis of sets, their intersections, and aggregates of intersections. UpSet is focused on creating task-driven aggregates, communicating the size and properties of aggregates and intersections, and a duality between the visualization of the elements in a dataset and their set membership. UpSet visualizes set intersections in a matrix layout and introduces aggregates based on groupings and queries. The matrix layout enables the effective representation of associated data, such as the number of elements in the aggregates and intersections, as well as additional summary statistics derived from subset or element attributes. Sorting according to various measures enables a task-driven analysis of relevant intersections and aggregates. The elements represented in the sets and their associated attributes are visualized in a separate view. Queries based on containment in specific intersections, aggregates or driven by attribute filters are propagated between both views. We also introduce several advanced visual encodings and interaction methods to overcome the problems of varying scales and to address scalability. UpSet is web-based and open source. We demonstrate its general utility in multiple use cases from various domains. | false | false | [
"Alexander Lex",
"Nils Gehlenborg",
"Hendrik Strobelt",
"Romain Vuillemot",
"Hanspeter Pfister"
] | [
"TT"
] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Visual Parameter Space Analysis: A Conceptual Framework | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346321 | Various case studies in different application domains have shown the great potential of visual parameter space analysis to support validating and using simulation models. In order to guide and systematize research endeavors in this area, we provide a conceptual framework for visual parameter space analysis problems. The framework is based on our own experience and a structured analysis of the visualization literature. It contains three major components: (1) a data flow model that helps to abstractly describe visual parameter space analysis problems independent of their application domain; (2) a set of four navigation strategies of how parameter space analysis can be supported by visualization tools; and (3) a characterization of six analysis tasks. Based on our framework, we analyze and classify the current body of literature, and identify three open research gaps in visual parameter space analysis. The framework and its discussion are meant to support visualization designers and researchers in characterizing parameter space analysis problems and to guide their design and evaluation processes. | false | false | [
"Michael Sedlmair",
"Christoph Heinzl",
"Stefan Bruckner",
"Harald Piringer",
"Torsten Möller"
] | [] | [] | [] |
InfoVis | 2,014 | Visualizing Statistical Mix Effects and Simpson's Paradox | 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346297 | We discuss how “mix effects” can surprise users of visualizations and potentially lead them to incorrect conclusions. This statistical issue (also known as “omitted variable bias” or, in extreme cases, as “Simpson's paradox”) is widespread and can affect any visualization in which the quantity of interest is an aggregated value such as a weighted sum or average. Our first contribution is to document how mix effects can be a serious issue for visualizations, and we analyze how mix effects can cause problems in a variety of popular visualization techniques, from bar charts to treemaps. Our second contribution is a new technique, the “comet chart,” that is meant to ameliorate some of these issues. | false | false | [
"Zan Armstrong",
"Martin Wattenberg"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | 4D MRI Flow Coupled to Physics-Based Fluid Simulation for Blood-Flow Visualization | 10.1111/cgf.12368 | Modern MRI measurements deliver volumetric and time‐varying blood‐flow data of unprecedented quality. Visual analysis of these data potentially leads to a better diagnosis and risk assessment of various cardiovascular diseases. Recent advances have improved the speed and quality of the imaging data considerably. Nevertheless, the data remains compromised by noise and a lack of spatiotemporal resolution. Besides imaging data, also numerical simulations are employed. These are based on mathematical models of specific features of physical reality. However, these models require realistic parameters and boundary conditions based on measurements. We propose to use data assimilation to bring measured data and physically‐based simulation together, and to harness the mutual benefits. The accuracy and noise robustness of the coupled approach is validated using an analytic flow field. Furthermore, we present a comparative visualization that conveys the differences between using conventional interpolation and our coupled approach. | false | false | [
"Niels H. L. C. de Hoon",
"Roy van Pelt",
"Andrei C. Jalba",
"Anna Vilanova"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | A Gaze-enabled Graph Visualization to Improve Graph Reading Tasks | 10.1111/cgf.12381 | Performing typical network tasks such as node scanning and path tracing can be difficult in large and dense graphs. To alleviate this problem we use eye‐tracking as an interactive input to detect tasks that users intend to perform and then produce unobtrusive visual changes that support these tasks. First, we introduce a novel fovea based filtering that dims out edges with endpoints far removed from a user's view focus. Second, we highlight edges that are being traced at any given moment or have been the focus of recent attention. Third, we track recently viewed nodes and increase the saliency of their neighborhoods. All visual responses are unobtrusive and easily ignored to avoid unintentional distraction and to account for the imprecise and low‐resolution nature of eye‐tracking. We also introduce a novel gaze‐correction approach that relies on knowledge about the network layout to reduce eye‐tracking error. Finally, we present results from a controlled user study showing that our methods led to a statistically significant accuracy improvement in one of two network tasks and that our gaze‐correction algorithm enables more accurate eye‐tracking interaction. | false | false | [
"Mershack Okoe",
"Sayeed Safayet Alam",
"Radu Jianu"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Authoring Narrative Visualizations with Ellipsis | 10.1111/cgf.12392 | Data visualization is now a popular medium for journalistic storytelling. However, current visualization tools either lack support for storytelling or require significant technical expertise. Informed by interviews with journalists, we introduce a model of storytelling abstractions that includes state‐based scene structure, dynamic annotations and decoupled coordination of multiple visualization components. We instantiate our model in Ellipsis: a system that combines a domain‐specific language (DSL) for storytelling with a graphical interface for story authoring. User interactions are automatically translated into statements in the Ellipsis DSL. By enabling storytelling without programming, the Ellipsis interface lowers the threshold for authoring narrative visualizations. We evaluate Ellipsis through example applications and user studies with award‐winning journalists. Study participants find Ellipsis to be a valuable prototyping tool that can empower journalists in the creation of interactive narratives. | false | false | [
"Arvind Satyanarayan",
"Jeffrey Heer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Comparative Blood Flow Visualization for Cerebral Aneurysm Treatment Assessment | 10.1111/cgf.12369 | A pathological vessel dilation in the brain, termed cerebral aneurysm, bears a high risk of rupture, and is associated with a high mortality. In recent years, incidental findings of unruptured aneurysms have become more frequent, mainly due to advances in medical imaging. The pathological condition is often treated with a stent that diverts the blood flow from the aneurysm sac back to the original vessel. Prior to treatment, neuroradiologists need to decide on the optimal stent configuration and judge the long‐term rupture risk, for which blood flow information is essential. Modern patient‐specific simulations can model the hemodynamics for various stent configurations, providing important indicators to support the decision‐making process. However, the necessary visual analysis of these data becomes tedious and time‐consuming, because of the abundance of information. We introduce a comprehensive comparative visualization that integrates morphology with blood flow indicators to facilitate treatment assessment. To deal with the visual complexity, we propose a details‐on‐demand approach, combining established medical visualization techniques with innovative glyphs inspired by information visualization concepts. In an evaluation we have obtained informal feedback from domain experts, gauging the value of our visualization. | false | false | [
"Roy van Pelt",
"Rocco Gasteiger",
"Kai Lawonn",
"Monique Meuschke",
"Bernhard Preim"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Comparative Exploration of Document Collections: a Visual Analytics Approach | 10.1111/cgf.12376 | We present an analysis and visualization method for computing what distinguishes a given document collection from others. We determine topics that discriminate a subset of collections from the remaining ones by applying probabilistic topic modeling and subsequently approximating the two relevant criteria distinctiveness and characteristicness algorithmically through a set of heuristics. Furthermore, we suggest a novel visualization method called DiTop‐View, in which topics are represented by glyphs (topic coins) that are arranged on a 2D plane. Topic coins are designed to encode all information necessary for performing comparative analyses such as the class membership of a topic, its most probable terms and the discriminative relations. We evaluate our topic analysis using statistical measures and a small user experiment and present an expert case study with researchers from political sciences analyzing two real‐world datasets. | false | false | [
"Daniela Oelke",
"Hendrik Strobelt",
"Christian Rohrdantz",
"Iryna Gurevych",
"Oliver Deussen"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Comparative Visualization of Molecular Surfaces Using Deformable Models | 10.1111/cgf.12375 | The comparison of molecular surface attributes is of interest for computer aided drug design and the analysis of biochemical simulations. Due to the non‐rigid nature of molecular surfaces, partial shape matching is feasible for mapping two surfaces onto each other. We present a novel technique to obtain a mapping relation between two surfaces using a deformable model approach. This relation is used for pair‐wise comparison of local surface attributes (e.g. electrostatic potential). We combine the difference value as well as the comparability as derived from the local matching quality in a 3D molecular visualization by mapping them to color. A 2D matrix shows the global dissimilarity in an overview of different data sets in an ensemble. We apply our visualizations to simulation results provided by collaborators from the field of biochemistry to evaluate the effectiveness of our results. | false | false | [
"Katrin Scharnowski",
"Michael Krone",
"Guido Reina",
"Tobias Kulschewski",
"Jürgen Pleiss",
"Thomas Ertl"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | ConVis: A Visual Text Analytic System for Exploring Blog Conversations | 10.1111/cgf.12378 | Today it is quite common for people to exchange hundreds of comments in online conversations (e.g., blogs). Often, it can be very difficult to analyze and gain insights from such long conversations. To address this problem, we present a visual text analytic system that tightly integrates interactive visualization with novel text mining and summarization techniques to fulfill information needs of users in exploring conversations. At first, we perform a user requirement analysis for the domain of blog conversations to derive a set of design principles. Following these principles, we present an interface that visualizes a combination of various metadata and textual analysis results, supporting the user to interactively explore the blog conversations. We conclude with an informal user evaluation, which provides anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of our system and directions for further design. | false | false | [
"Enamul Hoque",
"Giuseppe Carenini"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Distortion-Guided Structure-Driven Interactive Exploration of High-Dimensional Data | 10.1111/cgf.12366 | Dimension reduction techniques are essential for feature selection and feature extraction of complex high‐dimensional data. These techniques, which construct low‐dimensional representations of data, are typically geometrically motivated, computationally efficient and approximately preserve certain structural properties of the data. However, they are often used as black box solutions in data exploration and their results can be difficult to interpret. To assess the quality of these results, quality measures, such as co‐ranking [LV09], have been proposed to quantify structural distortions that occur between high‐dimensional and low‐dimensional data representations. Such measures could be evaluated and visualized point‐wise to further highlight erroneous regions [MLGH13]. In this work, we provide an interactive visualization framework for exploring high‐dimensional data via its two‐dimensional embeddings obtained from dimension reduction, using a rich set of user interactions. We ask the following question: what new insights do we obtain regarding the structure of the data, with interactive manipulations of its embeddings in the visual space? We augment the two‐dimensional embeddings with structural abstractions obtained from hierarchical clusterings, to help users navigate and manipulate subsets of the data. We use point‐wise distortion measures to highlight interesting regions in the domain, and further to guide our selection of the appropriate level of clusterings that are aligned with the regions of interest. Under the static setting, point‐wise distortions indicate the level of structural uncertainty within the embeddings. Under the dynamic setting, on‐the‐fly updates of point‐wise distortions due to data movement and data deletion reflect structural relations among different parts of the data, which may lead to new and valuable insights. | false | false | [
"Shusen Liu 0001",
"Bei Wang 0001",
"Peer-Timo Bremer",
"Valerio Pascucci"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Evaluating the Impact of User Characteristics and Different Layouts on an Interactive Visualization for Decision Making | 10.1111/cgf.12393 | There is increasing evidence that user characteristics can have a significant impact on visualization effectiveness, suggesting that visualizations could be designed to better fit each user's specific needs. Most studies to date, however, have looked at static visualizations. Studies considering interactive visualizations have only looked at a limited number of user characteristics, and consider either low‐level tasks (e.g., value retrieval), or high‐level tasks (in particular: discovery), but not both. This paper contributes to this line of work by looking at the impact of a large set of user characteristics on user performance with interactive visualizations, for both low and high‐level tasks. We focus on interactive visualizations that support decision making, exemplified by a visualization known as Value Charts. We include in the study two versions of ValueCharts that differ in terms of layout, to ascertain whether layout mediates the impact of individual differences and could be considered as a form of personalization. Our key findings are that (i) performance with low and high‐level tasks is affected by different user characteristics, and (ii) users with low visual working memory perform better with a horizontal layout. We discuss how these findings can inform the provision of personalized support to visualization processing. | false | false | [
"Cristina Conati",
"Giuseppe Carenini",
"Enamul Hoque",
"Ben Steichen",
"Dereck Toker"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Extended Branch Decomposition Graphs: Structural Comparison of Scalar Data | 10.1111/cgf.12360 | We present a method to find repeating topological structures in scalar data sets. More precisely, we compare all subtrees of two merge trees against each other – in an efficient manner exploiting redundancy. This provides pair‐wise distances between the topological structures defined by sub/superlevel sets, which can be exploited in several applications such as finding similar structures in the same data set, assessing periodic behavior in time‐dependent data, and comparing the topology of two different data sets. To do so, we introduce a novel data structure called the extended branch decomposition graph, which is composed of the branch decompositions of all subtrees of the merge tree. Based on dynamic programming, we provide two highly efficient algorithms for computing and comparing extended branch decomposition graphs. Several applications attest to the utility of our method and its robustness against noise. | false | false | [
"Himangshu Saikia",
"Hans-Peter Seidel",
"Tino Weinkauf"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Extracting Features from Time-Dependent Vector Fields Using Internal Reference Frames | 10.1111/cgf.12358 | Extracting features from complex, time‐dependent flow fields remains a significant challenge despite substantial research efforts, especially because most flow features of interest are defined with respect to a given reference frame. Pathline‐based techniques, such as the FTLE field, are complex to implement and resource intensive, whereas scalar transforms, such as λ2, often produce artifacts and require somewhat arbitrary thresholds. Both approaches aim to analyze the flow in a more suitable frame, yet neither technique explicitly constructs one.This paper introduces a new data‐driven technique to compute internal reference frames for large‐scale complex flows. More general than uniformly moving frames, these frames can transform unsteady fields, which otherwise require substantial processing of resources, into a sequence of individual snapshots that can be analyzed using the large body of steady‐flow analysis techniques. Our approach is simple, theoretically well‐founded, and uses an embarrassingly parallel algorithm for structured as well as unstructured data. Using several case studies from fluid flow and turbulent combustion, we demonstrate that internal frames are distinguished, result in temporally coherent structures, and can extract well‐known as well as notoriously elusive features one snapshot at a time. | false | false | [
"Harsh Bhatia",
"Valerio Pascucci",
"Robert M. Kirby",
"Peer-Timo Bremer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Glyphs for Exploring Crowd-sourced Subjective Survey Classification | 10.1111/cgf.12387 | The findings drawn from opinion survey responses are usually made by producing summary charts or conducting statistical analysis. Both involve data aggregation and filtering as exploring the unaggregated data has traditionally been impractical or error‐prone for large numbers of responses. We propose the use of glyphs with parallel coordinate plots to show all survey responses in a single view and design an interactive visual analytics tool around the representation to explore the data. We use this software for a ‘photo content assessment’ survey, where 359 participants classify 900 images by seven criteria. The proposed approach allows all 8,434 responses (49,285 answers to questions in total) to be represented in a single view and helps analysts to both clean the data and understand the nature of the survey responses. We describe the construction of the survey response glyphs and the interface to the interactive visual analytics software and generalise the design principles that arise from the approach. We apply the tool to two other datasets to evaluate the technique and to confirm its wider applicability for surveys with Likert scale responses. | false | false | [
"Alexander Kachkaev",
"Jo Wood",
"Jason Dykes"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | GuideME: Slice-guided Semiautomatic Multivariate Exploration of Volumes | 10.1111/cgf.12371 | Multivariate volume visualization is important for many applications including petroleum exploration and medicine. State‐of‐the‐art tools allow users to interactively explore volumes with multiple linked parameter‐space views. However, interactions in the parameter space using trial‐and‐error may be unintuitive and time consuming. Furthermore, switching between different views may be distracting. In this paper, we propose GuideME: a novel slice‐guided semiautomatic multivariate volume exploration approach. Specifically, the approach comprises four stages: attribute inspection, guided uncertainty‐aware lasso creation, automated feature extraction and optional spatial fine tuning and visualization. Throughout the exploration process, the user does not need to interact with the parameter views at all and examples of complex real‐world data demonstrate the usefulness, efficiency and ease‐of‐use of our method. | false | false | [
"Liang Zhou",
"Charles D. Hansen"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Illustrative Visualization of Molecular Reactions using Omniscient Intelligence and Passive Agents | 10.1111/cgf.12370 | In this paper we propose a new type of a particle systems, tailored for illustrative visualization purposes, in particular for visualizing molecular reactions in biological networks. Previous visualizations of biochemical processes were exploiting the results of agent‐based modeling. Such modeling aims at reproducing accurately the stochastic nature of molecular interactions. However, it is impossible to expect events of interest happening at a certain time and location, which is impractical for storytelling. To obtain the means of controlling molecular interactions, we propose to govern passive agents with an omniscient intelligence, instead of giving to the agents the freedom of initiating reaction autonomously. This makes it possible to generate illustrative animated stories that communicate the functioning of the molecular machinery. The rendering performance delivers for interactive framerates of massive amounts of data, based on the dynamic tessellation capabilities of modern graphics cards. Finally, we report an informal expert feedback we obtained from the potential users. | false | false | [
"Mathieu Le Muzic",
"Július Parulek",
"Anne-Kristin Stavrum",
"Ivan Viola"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | InSpectr: Multi-Modal Exploration, Visualization, and Analysis of Spectral Data | 10.1111/cgf.12365 | This paper addresses the increasing demand in industry for methods to analyze and visualize multimodal data involving a spectral modality. Two data modalities are used: high‐resolution X‐ray computed tomography (XCT) for structural characterization and low‐resolution X‐ray fluorescence (XRF) spectral data for elemental decomposition. We present InSpectr, an integrated tool for the interactive exploration and visual analysis of multimodal, multiscalar data. The tool has been designed around a set of tasks identified by domain experts in the fields of XCT and XRF. It supports registered single scalar and spectral datasets optionally coupled with element maps and reference spectra. InSpectr is instantiating various linked views for the integration of spatial and non‐spatial information to provide insight into an industrial component's structural and material composition: views with volume renderings of composite and individual 3D element maps visualize global material composition; transfer functions defined directly on the spectral data and overlaid pie‐chart glyphs show elemental composition in 2D slice‐views; a representative aggregated spectrum and spectra density histograms are introduced to provide a global overview in the spectral view. Spectral magic lenses, spectrum probing and elemental composition probing of points using a pie‐chart view and a periodic table view aid the local material composition analysis. Two datasets are investigated to outline the usefulness of the presented techniques: a 3D virtually created phantom with a brass metal alloy and a real‐world 2D water phantom with insertions of gold, barium, and gadolinium. Additionally a detailed user evaluation of the results is provided. | false | false | [
"Artem Amirkhanov",
"Bernhard Fröhler",
"Johann Kastner",
"M. Eduard Gröller",
"Christoph Heinzl"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Line Integral Convolution for Real-Time Illustration of Molecular Surface Shape and Salient Regions | 10.1111/cgf.12374 | We present a novel line drawing algorithm that illustrates surfaces in real‐time to convey their shape. We use line integral convolution (LIC) and employ ambient occlusion for illustrative surface rendering. Furthermore, our method depicts salient regions based on the illumination gradient. Our method works on animated surfaces in a frame‐coherent manner. Therefore, it yields an illustrative representation of time‐dependent surfaces as no preprocessing step is needed. In this paper, the method is used to highlight the structure of molecular surfaces and to illustrate important surface features like cavities, channels, and pockets. The benefit of our method was evaluated with domain experts. We also demonstrate the applicability of our method to medical visualization. | false | false | [
"Kai Lawonn",
"Michael Krone",
"Thomas Ertl",
"Bernhard Preim"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | LoVis: Local Pattern Visualization for Model Refinement | 10.1111/cgf.12389 | Linear models are commonly used to identify trends in data. While it is an easy task to build linear models using pre‐selected variables, it is challenging to select the best variables from a large number of alternatives. Most metrics for selecting variables are global in nature, and thus not useful for identifying local patterns. In this work, we present an integrated framework with visual representations that allows the user to incrementally build and verify models in three model spaces that support local pattern discovery and summarization: model complementarity, model diversity, and model representivity. Visual representations are designed and implemented for each of the model spaces. Our visualizations enable the discovery of complementary variables, i.e., those that perform well in modeling different subsets of data points. They also support the isolation of local models based on a diversity measure. Furthermore, the system integrates a hierarchical representation to identify the outlier local trends and the local trends that share similar directions in the model space. A case study on financial risk analysis is discussed, followed by a user study. | false | false | [
"Kaiyu Zhao",
"Matthew O. Ward",
"Elke A. Rundensteiner",
"Huong Ngo Higgins"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Lyra: An Interactive Visualization Design Environment | 10.1111/cgf.12391 | We present Lyra, an interactive environment for designing customized visualizations without writing code. Using drag‐and‐drop interactions, designers can bind data to the properties of graphical marks to author expressive visualization designs. Marks can be moved, rotated and resized using handles; relatively positioned using connectors; and parameterized by data fields using property drop zones. Lyra also provides a data pipeline interface for iterative, visual specification of data transformations and layout algorithms. Visualizations created with Lyra are represented as specifications in Vega, a declarative visualization grammar that enables sharing and reuse. We evaluate Lyra's expressivity and accessibility through diverse examples and studies with journalists and visualization designers. We find that Lyra enables users to rapidly develop customized visualizations, covering a design space comparable to existing programming‐based tools. | false | false | [
"Arvind Satyanarayan",
"Jeffrey Heer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Mandatory Critical Points of 2D Uncertain Scalar Fields | 10.1111/cgf.12359 | This paper introduces a novel, non‐local characterization of critical points and their global relation in 2D uncertain scalar fields. The characterization is based on the analysis of the support of the probability density functions (PDF) of the input data. Given two scalar fields representing reliable estimations of the bounds of this support, our strategy identifies mandatory critical points: spatial regions and function ranges where critical points have to occur in any realization of the input. The algorithm provides a global pairing scheme for mandatory critical points which is used to construct mandatory join and split trees. These trees enable a visual exploration of the common topological structure of all possible realizations of the uncertain data. To allow multi‐scale visualization, we introduce a simplification scheme for mandatory critical point pairs revealing the most dominant features. Our technique is purely combinatorial and handles parametric distribution models and ensemble data. It does not depend on any computational parameter and does not suffer from numerical inaccuracy or global inconsistency. The algorithm exploits ideas of the established join/split tree computation. It is therefore simple to implement, and its complexity is output‐sensitive. We illustrate, evaluate, and verify our method on synthetic and real‐world data. | false | false | [
"David Günther",
"Joseph Salmon",
"Julien Tierny"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Many Plans: Multidimensional Ensembles for Visual Decision Support in Flood Management | 10.1111/cgf.12384 | Uncertainties in flood predictions complicate the planning of mitigation measures. There is a consensus that many possible incident scenarios should be considered. For each scenario, a specific response plan should be prepared which is optimal with respect to criteria such as protection, costs, or realization time. None of the existing software tools is capable of creating large scenario pools, nor do they provide means for quick exploration and assessment of the associated plans. In this paper, we present an integrated solution that is based on multidimensional, time‐dependent ensemble simulations of incident scenarios and protective measures. We provide scalable interfaces which facilitate and accelerate setting up multiple time‐varying parameters for generating a pool of pre‐cooked scenarios. In case of an emergency, disaster managers can quickly extract relevant information from the pool to deal with the situation at hand. An interactive 3D‐view conveys details about how a response plan has to be executed. Linked information visualization and ranking views allow for a quick assessment of many plans. In collaboration with flood managers, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our solution. We tackle the challenges of planning mobile water barriers for protecting important infrastructure. We account for real‐world limitations of available resources and handle the involved logistics problems. | false | false | [
"Jürgen Waser",
"Artem Konev",
"Bernhard Sadransky",
"Zsolt Horváth",
"Hrvoje Ribicic",
"Robert Carnecky",
"P. Kluding",
"Benjamin Schindler"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Methods for Compensating Contrast Effects in Information Visualization | 10.1111/cgf.12379 | Color, as one of the most effective visual variables, is used in many techniques to encode and group data points according to different features. Relations between features and groups appear as visual patterns in the visualization. However, optical illusions may bias the perception at the first level of the analysis process. For instance, in pixel‐based visualizations contrast effects make pixels appear brighter if surrounded by a darker area, which distorts the encoded metric quantity of the data points. Even if we are aware of these perceptual issues, our visual cognition system is not able to compensate these effects accurately. To overcome this limitation, we present a color optimization algorithm based on perceptual metrics and color perception models to reduce physiological contrast or color effects. We evaluate our technique with a user study and find that the technique doubles the accuracy of users comparing and estimating color encoded data values. Since the presented technique can be used in any application without adaption to the visualization itself, we are able to demonstrate its effectiveness on data visualizations in different domains. | false | false | [
"Sebastian Mittelstädt",
"Andreas Stoffel",
"Daniel A. Keim"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Metro Transit-Centric Visualization for City Tour Planning | 10.1111/cgf.12383 | In general, city trip planning consists of two main steps: knowing Points‐Of‐Interest (POIs), and then planning a tour route from the current point to next preferred POIs. We mainly consider the metro for traveling around touristic cities as the main means of transportation. In this context, existing tools lack a capability to effectively visualize POIs on the metro map for trip planning. To bridge this gap, we propose an interactive framework that holistically combines presentations of POIs and a metro network. Our idea is to identify popular POIs based on visual worth computation, and to introduce POI discovery for effectively identifying POIs within reach of a metro network for users. We use octilinear layouts to highlight the metro network, and show representative POI images in the layout space visualized within a user‐specified viewing window. We have implemented our working prototype showing touristic cities with a metro network. We have factored out various design guidelines that are basis for designing our method, and validated our approach with a user study surveying 70 individuals. | false | false | [
"Pio Claudio",
"Sung-Eui Yoon"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Networks of Names: Visual Exploration and Semi-Automatic Tagging of Social Networks from Newspaper Articles | 10.1111/cgf.12377 | Understanding relationships between people and organizations by reading newspaper articles is difficult to manage for humans due to the large amount of data. To address this problem, we present and evaluate a new visual analytics system, which offers interactive exploration and tagging of social networks extracted from newspapers. For the visual exploration of the network, we extract “interesting” neighbourhoods of nodes, using a new degree of interest (DOI) measure based on edges instead of nodes. It improves the seminal definition of DOI, which we find to produce the same “globally interesting” neighbourhoods in our use case, regardless of the query. Our approach allows answering different user queries appropriately, avoiding uniform search results.We propose a user‐driven pattern‐based classifier for discovery and tagging of non‐taxonomic semantic relations. Our approach does not require any a‐priori user knowledge, such as expertise in syntax or pattern creation. An evaluation shows that our classifier is capable of identifying known lexico‐syntactic patterns as well as various domain‐specific patters. Our classifier yields good results already with a small amount of training, and continuously improves through user feedback.We conduct a user study to evaluate whether our visual interactive system has an impact on how users tag relationships, as compared to traditional text‐based interfaces. Study results suggest that users of the visual system tend to tag more concisely, avoiding too abstract or overly specific relationship labels. | false | false | [
"Artjom Kochtchi",
"Tatiana von Landesberger",
"Chris Biemann"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Opacity Optimization for Surfaces | 10.1111/cgf.12357 | In flow visualization, integral surfaces rapidly tend to expand, fold and produce vast amounts of occlusion. While silhouette enhancements and local transparency mappings proved useful for semi‐transparent depictions, they still introduce visual clutter when surfaces grow more complex. An effective visualization of the flow requires a balance between the presentation of interesting surface parts and the avoidance of occlusions that hinder the view. In this paper, we extend the concept of opacity optimization to surfaces to obtain a global approach to the occlusion problem. Starting with a partition of the surfaces into patches, we compute per‐patch opacity as minimizer of a bounded‐variable least‐squares problem. For the final rendering, opacity is interpolated on the surfaces. The resulting visualization technique is interactive, frame‐coherent, view‐dependent and driven by domain knowledge. | false | false | [
"Tobias Günther",
"Maik Schulze",
"Janick Martinez Esturo",
"Christian Rössl",
"Holger Theisel"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Papilio: Visualizing Android Application Permissions | 10.1111/cgf.12395 | We introduce Papilio, a new visualization technique for visualizing permissions of real‐world Android applications. We explore the development of layouts that exploit the directed acyclic nature of Android application permission data to develop a new explicit layout technique that incorporates aspects of set membership, node‐link diagrams and matrix layouts. By grouping applications based on sets of requested permissions, a structure can be formed with partially ordered relations. The Papilio layout shows sets of applications centrally, the relations among applications on one side and application permissions, as the reason behind the existence of the partial order, on the other side. Using Papilio to explore a set of Android applications as a case study has led to new security findings regarding permission usage by Android applications. | false | false | [
"M. Hosseinkhani Loorak",
"Philip W. L. Fong",
"Sheelagh Carpendale"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Parallel Irradiance Caching for Interactive Monte-Carlo Direct Volume Rendering | 10.1111/cgf.12362 | We propose a technique to build the irradiance cache for isotropic scattering simultaneously with Monte Carlo progressive direct volume rendering on a single GPU, which allows us to achieve up to four times increased convergence rate for complex scenes with arbitrary sources of light. We use three procedures that run concurrently on a single GPU. The first is the main rendering procedure. The second procedure computes new cache entries, and the third one corrects the errors that may arise after creation of new cache entries. We propose two distinct approaches to allow massive parallelism of cache entry creation. In addition, we show a novel extrapolation approach which outputs high quality irradiance approximations and a suitable prioritization scheme to increase the convergence rate by dedicating more computational power to more complex rendering areas. | false | false | [
"Rostislav Khlebnikov",
"Philip Voglreiter",
"Markus Steinberger",
"Bernhard Kainz",
"Dieter Schmalstieg"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | RBF Volume Ray Casting on Multicore and Manycore CPUs | 10.1111/cgf.12363 | Modern supercomputers enable increasingly large N‐body simulations using unstructured point data. The structures implied by these points can be reconstructed implicitly. Direct volume rendering of radial basis function (RBF) kernels in domain‐space offers flexible classification and robust feature reconstruction, but achieving performant RBF volume rendering remains a challenge for existing methods on both CPUs and accelerators. In this paper, we present a fast CPU method for direct volume rendering of particle data with RBF kernels. We propose a novel two‐pass algorithm: first sampling the RBF field using coherent bounding hierarchy traversal, then subsequently integrating samples along ray segments. Our approach performs interactively for a range of data sets from molecular dynamics and astrophysics up to 82 million particles. It does not rely on level of detail or subsampling, and offers better reconstruction quality than structured volume rendering of the same data, exhibiting comparable performance and requiring no additional preprocessing or memory footprint other than the BVH. Lastly, our technique enables multi‐field, multi‐material classification of particle data, providing better insight and analysis. | false | false | [
"Aaron Knoll",
"Ingo Wald",
"Paul A. Navrátil",
"Anne Bowen",
"Khairi Reda",
"Michael E. Papka",
"Kelly P. Gaither"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Semi-Automatic Editing of Graphs with Customized Layouts | 10.1111/cgf.12394 | Usually visualization is applied to gain insight into data. Yet consuming the data in form of visual representation is not always enough. Instead, users need to edit the data, preferably through the same means used to visualize them. In this work, we present a semi‐automatic approach to visual editing of graphs. The key idea is to use an interactive EditLens that defines where an edit operation affects an already customized and established graph layout. Locally optimal node positions within the lens and edge routes to connected nodes are calculated according to different criteria. This spares the user much manual work, but still provides sufficient freedom to accommodate application‐dependent layout constraints. Our approach utilizes the advantages of multi‐touch gestures, and is also compatible with classic mouse and keyboard interaction. Preliminary user tests have been conducted with researchers from bio‐informatics who need to manually maintain a slowly, but constantly growing molecular network. As the user feedback indicates, our solution significantly improves the editing procedure applied so far. | false | false | [
"Stefan Gladisch",
"Heidrun Schumann",
"M. Ernst",
"Georg Füllen",
"Christian Tominski"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Sets of Globally Optimal Stream Surfaces for Flow Visualization | 10.1111/cgf.12356 | Stream surfaces are a well‐studied and widely used tool for the visualization of 3D flow fields. Usually, stream surface seeding is carried out manually in time‐consuming trial and error procedures. Only recently automatic selection methods were proposed. Local methods support the selection of a set of stream surfaces, but, contrary to global selection methods, they evaluate only the quality of the seeding lines but not the quality of the whole stream surfaces. Global methods, on the other hand, only support the selection of a single optimal stream surface until now. However, for certain flow fields a single stream surface is not sufficient to represent all flow features.In our work, we overcome this limitation by introducing a global selection technique for a set of stream surfaces. All selected surfaces optimize global stream surface quality measures and are guaranteed to be mutually distant, such that they can convey different flow features. Our approach is an efficient extension of the most recent global selection method for single stream surfaces. We illustrate its effectiveness on a number of analytical and simulated flow fields and analyze the quality of the results in a user study. | false | false | [
"Maik Schulze",
"Janick Martinez Esturo",
"Tobias Günther",
"Christian Rössl",
"Hans-Peter Seidel",
"Tino Weinkauf",
"Holger Theisel"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | SimilarityExplorer: A Visual Inter-Comparison Tool for Multifaceted Climate Data | 10.1111/cgf.12390 | Inter‐comparison and similarity analysis to gauge consensus among multiple simulation models is a critical visualization problem for understanding climate change patterns. Climate models, specifically, Terrestrial Biosphere Models (TBM) represent time and space variable ecosystem processes, like, simulations of photosynthesis and respiration, using algorithms and driving variables such as climate and land use. While it is widely accepted that interactive visualization can enable scientists to better explore model similarity from different perspectives and different granularity of space and time, currently there is a lack of such visualization tools.In this paper we present three main contributions. First, we propose a domain characterization for the TBM community by systematically defining the domain‐specific intents for analyzing model similarity and characterizing the different facets of the data. Second, we define a classification scheme for combining visualization tasks and multiple facets of climate model data in one integrated framework, which can be leveraged for translating the tasks into the visualization design. Finally, we present SimilarityExplorer, an exploratory visualization tool that facilitates similarity comparison tasks across both space and time through a set of coordinated multiple views. We present two case studies from three climate scientists, who used our tool for a month for gaining scientific insights into model similarity. Their experience and results validate the effectiveness of our tool. | false | false | [
"Jorge Poco",
"Aritra Dasgupta",
"Yaxing Wei",
"William W. Hargrove",
"Christopher R. Schwalm",
"Robert B. Cook",
"Enrico Bertini",
"Cláudio T. Silva"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Sparse Representation and Visualization for Direct Numerical Simulation of Premixed Combustion | 10.1111/cgf.12388 | Direct Numerical Simulations of premixed combustion produce terabytes of raw data, which are prohibitively large to be stored, and have to be analyzed and visualized. A simultaneous and integrated treatment of data storage, data analysis and data visualization is required. For this, we introduce a sparse representation tailored to DNS data which can directly be used for both analysis and visualization. The method is based on the observation that most information is located in narrow‐band regions where the chemical reactions take place, but these regions are not well defined. An approach for the visual investigation of feature surfaces of the scalar fields involved in the simulation is shown as a possible application. We demonstrate our approach on multiple real datasets. | false | false | [
"Timo Oster",
"Dirk J. Lehmann",
"Gordon Fru",
"Holger Theisel",
"Dominique Thévenin"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Stability of Dissipation Elements: A Case Study in Combustion | 10.1111/cgf.12361 | Recently, dissipation elements have been gaining popularity as a mechanism for measurement of fundamental properties of turbulent flow, such as turbulence length scales and zonal partitioning. Dissipation elements segment a domain according to the source and destination of streamlines in the gradient flow field of a scalar function f : → ℝ. They have traditionally been computed by numerically integrating streamlines from the center of each voxel in the positive and negative gradient directions, and grouping those voxels whose streamlines terminate at the same extremal pair. We show that the same structures map well to combinatorial topology concepts developed recently in the visualization community. Namely, dissipation elements correspond to sets of cells of the Morse‐Smale complex. The topology‐based formulation enables a more exploratory analysis of the nature of dissipation elements, in particular, in understanding their stability with respect to small scale variations. We present two examples from combustion science that raise significant questions about the role of small scale perturbation and indeed the definition of dissipation elements themselves. | false | false | [
"Attila Gyulassy",
"Peer-Timo Bremer",
"Ray W. Grout",
"Hemanth Kolla",
"Jacqueline Chen",
"Valerio Pascucci"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Towards an Unbiased Comparison of CC, BCC, and FCC Lattices in Terms of Prealiasing | 10.1111/cgf.12364 | In the literature on optimal regular volume sampling, the Body‐Centered Cubic (BCC) lattice has been proven to be optimal for sampling spherically band‐limited signals above the Nyquist limit. On the other hand, if the sampling frequency is below the Nyquist limit, the Face‐Centered Cubic (FCC) lattice was demonstrated to be optimal in reducing the prealiasing effect. In this paper, we confirm that the FCC lattice is indeed optimal in this sense in a certain interval of the sampling frequency. By theoretically estimating the prealiasing error in a realistic range of the sampling frequency, we show that in other frequency intervals, the BCC lattice and even the traditional Cartesian Cubic (CC) lattice are expected to minimize the prealiasing. The BCC lattice is superior over the FCC lattice if the sampling frequency is not significantly below the Nyquist limit. Interestingly, if the original signal is drastically undersampled, the CC lattice is expected to provide the lowest prealiasing error. Additionally, we give a comprehensible clarification that the sampling efficiency of the FCC lattice is lower than that of the BCC lattice. Although this is a well‐known fact, the exact percentage has been erroneously reported in the literature. Furthermore, for the sake of an unbiased comparison, we propose to rotate the Marschner‐Lobb test signal such that an undue advantage is not given to either lattice. | false | false | [
"Viktor Vad",
"Balázs Csébfalvi",
"Peter Rautek",
"M. Eduard Gröller"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visual Analysis of Sets of Heterogeneous Matrices Using Projection-Based Distance Functions and Semantic Zoom | 10.1111/cgf.12397 | Matrix visualization is an established technique in the analysis of relational data. It is applicable to large, dense networks, where node‐link representations may not be effective. Recently, domains have emerged in which the comparative analysis of sets of matrices of potentially varying size is relevant. For example, to monitor computer network traffic a dynamic set of hosts and their peer‐to‐peer connections on different ports must be analysed. A matrix visualization focused on the display of one matrix at a time cannot cope with this task.We address the research problem of the visual analysis of sets of matrices. We present a technique for comparing matrices of potentially varying size. Our approach considers the rows and/or columns of a matrix as the basic elements of the analysis. We project these vectors for pairs of matrices into a low‐dimensional space which is used as the reference to compare matrices and identify relationships among them. Bipartite graph matching is applied on the projected elements to compute a measure of distance. A key advantage of this measure is that it can be interpreted and manipulated as a visual distance function, and serves as a comprehensible basis for ranking, clustering and comparison in sets of matrices. We present an interactive system in which users may explore the matrix distances and understand potential differences in a set of matrices. A flexible semantic zoom mechanism enables users to navigate through sets of matrices and identify patterns at different levels of detail. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a case study and provide a technical evaluation to illustrate its strengths. | false | false | [
"Michael Behrisch 0001",
"James Davey",
"Fabian Fischer 0001",
"Olivier Thonnard",
"Tobias Schreck",
"Daniel A. Keim",
"Jörn Kohlhammer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visual Analysis of Time-Series Similarities for Anomaly Detection in Sensor Networks | 10.1111/cgf.12396 | We present a system to analyze time‐series data in sensor networks. Our approach supports exploratory tasks for the comparison of univariate, geo‐referenced sensor data, in particular for anomaly detection. We split the recordings into fixed‐length patterns and show them in order to compare them over time and space using two linked views. Apart from geo‐based comparison across sensors we also support different temporal patterns to discover seasonal effects, anomalies and periodicities.The methods we use are best practices in the information visualization domain. They cover the daily, the weekly and seasonal and patterns of the data. Daily patterns can be analyzed in a clustering‐based view, weekly patterns in a calendar‐based view and seasonal patters in a projection‐based view. The connectivity of the sensors can be analyzed through a dedicated topological network view. We assist the domain expert with interaction techniques to make the results understandable. As a result, the user can identify and analyze erroneous and suspicious measurements in the network. A case study with a domain expert verified the usefulness of our approach. | false | false | [
"Martin Steiger",
"Jürgen Bernard",
"Sebastian Mittelstädt",
"Hendrik Lücke-Tieke",
"Daniel A. Keim",
"Thorsten May",
"Jörn Kohlhammer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visual Multiplexing | 10.1111/cgf.12380 | The majority of display devices used in visualization are 2D displays. Inevitably, it is often necessary to overlay one piece of visual information on top of another, especially in applications such as multi‐field visualization and geo‐spatial information visualization. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for studying the mechanisms for overlaying multiple pieces of visual information while allowing users to recover occluded information. We adopt the term ‘multiplexing’ from tele‐ and data communication to encompass all such overlapping mechanisms. We establish 10 categories of visual multiplexing mechanisms. We draw support evidence from both perception literature and existing works in visualization to support this conceptual framework. We examine the relationships between multiplexing and information theoretic measures. This new conceptual categorization provides the much‐needed theory of visualization with an integral component. | false | false | [
"Min Chen 0001",
"Simon J. Walton",
"Kai Berger",
"Jeyarajan Thiyagalingam",
"Brian Duffy",
"Hui Fang 0003",
"Cameron Holloway",
"Anne E. Trefethen"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visual-interactive Exploration of Interesting Multivariate Relations in Mixed Research Data Sets | 10.1111/cgf.12385 | The analysis of research data plays a key role in data‐driven areas of science. Varieties of mixed research data sets exist and scientists aim to derive or validate hypotheses to find undiscovered knowledge. Many analysis techniques identify relations of an entire dataset only. This may level the characteristic behavior of different subgroups in the data. Like automatic subspace clustering, we aim at identifying interesting subgroups and attribute sets. We present a visual‐interactive system that supports scientists to explore interesting relations between aggregated bins of multivariate attributes in mixed data sets. The abstraction of data to bins enables the application of statistical dependency tests as the measure of interestingness. An overview matrix view shows all attributes, ranked with respect to the interestingness of bins. Complementary, a node‐link view reveals multivariate bin relations by positioning dependent bins close to each other. The system supports information drill‐down based on both expert knowledge and algorithmic support. Finally, visual‐interactive subset clustering assigns multivariate bin relations to groups. A list‐based cluster result representation enables the scientist to communicate multivariate findings at a glance. We demonstrate the applicability of the system with two case studies from the earth observation domain and the prostate cancer research domain. In both cases, the system enabled us to identify the most interesting multivariate bin relations, to validate already published results, and, moreover, to discover unexpected relations. | false | false | [
"Jürgen Bernard",
"Martin Steiger",
"Sven Widmer",
"Hendrik Lücke-Tieke",
"Thorsten May",
"Jörn Kohlhammer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visualization of Medicine Prescription Behavior | 10.1111/cgf.12372 | Medicine prescriptions play an important role in medical treatments. More insight in medicine prescription behavior can lead to more efficient and effective treatments, as well as reflection on prescription behavior for specific physicians, types of medicines, or classes of patients. Most current medical visualization systems show health data only from the perspective of patients, whereas to understand prescription behavior multiple perspectives are relevant. We present a new approach to visualize prescription data from four different perspectives: physician, patient, medicine, and prescription. Information about physicians, patients, and medicines is shown in three tables; relations between selected items in these tables are shown using custom glyphs and histograms. These tables can also be used to define selections of prescriptions which can be compared to each other by showing a variety of metrics. This enables physicians and possibly other stakeholders to perform a wide variety of queries and inspections, while the use of familiar metaphors, such as tables and histograms, enables them to use the system in short time. This was confirmed by an evaluation session with six neurologists from an institute of epileptology. Our system is tailored to medicine prescription data, but we argue that the underlying pattern in the data is ubiquitous, and that hence our approach can be useful for many other cases where A provides B to C. | false | false | [
"Paul van der Corput",
"Johan Arends",
"Jarke J. van Wijk"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visualizing Multidimensional Data with Glyph SPLOMs | 10.1111/cgf.12386 | Scatterplot matrices or SPLOMs provide a feasible method of visualizing and representing multi‐dimensional data especially for a small number of dimensions. For very high dimensional data, we introduce a novel technique to summarize a SPLOM, as a clustered matrix of glyphs, or a Glyph SPLOM. Each glyph visually encodes a general measure of dependency strength, distance correlation, and a logical dependency class based on the occupancy of the scatterplot quadrants. We present the Glyph SPLOM as a general alternative to the traditional correlation based heatmap and the scatterplot matrix in two examples: demography data from the World Health Organization (WHO), and gene expression data from developmental biology. By using both, dependency class and strength, the Glyph SPLOM illustrates high dimensional data in more detail than a heatmap but with more summarization than a SPLOM. More importantly, the summarization capabilities of Glyph SPLOM allow for the assertion of “necessity” causal relationships in the data and the reconstruction of interaction networks in various dynamic systems. | false | false | [
"A. Yates",
"Amy Webb",
"Michael F. Sharpnack",
"H. Chamberlin",
"Kun Huang 0001",
"Raghu Machiraju"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visualizing Proximity-Based Spatiotemporal Behavior of Museum Visitors using Tangram Diagrams | 10.1111/cgf.12382 | For museum curators it is imperative to learn, analyze, and understand the behavior patterns of the visitors in their museum. Recent developments in the field of indoor positioning systems make the acquisition and availability of visitor behavior data more attainable. However, the analysis of such data remains a challenge due to its noisiness, complexity and sheer size. The current paper applies information visualization techniques to analyze this data and make it more accessible to museum curators and personnel. We first provide a detailed description of the application domain including an analysis of the curators' information needs and a description of how a dataset on visitors' spatiotemporal behavior could be acquired. In order to address the curators' needs, we designed a visualization to encode and convey the information based on a newly adjusted visual glyph that we call Tangram Diagrams. We thereby focus on the adaptability of the technique to a particular domain, rather than on the novelty aspects of the technique itself. We have evaluated our design decisions empirically, and conducted an expert study to describe the insights gained and the value of the information obtained from the visualization. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we apply information visualization to the museum domain and discuss how it extends to general indoor spatiotemporal behavior analysis. Second, we show how a visual glyph metaphor can be applied in different ways and contexts to efficiently encode multi‐faceted information. | false | false | [
"Joel Lanir",
"Peter Bak",
"Tsvi Kuflik"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Visualizing Validation of Protein Surface Classifiers | 10.1111/cgf.12373 | Many bioinformatics applications construct classifiers that are validated in experiments that compare their results to known ground truth over a corpus. In this paper, we introduce an approach for exploring the results of such classifier validation experiments, focusing on classifiers for regions of molecular surfaces. We provide a tool that allows for examining classification performance patterns over a test corpus. The approach combines a summary view that provides information about an entire corpus of molecules with a detail view that visualizes classifier results directly on protein surfaces. Rather than displaying miniature 3D views of each molecule, the summary provides 2D glyphs of each protein surface arranged in a reorderable, small‐multiples grid. Each summary is specifically designed to support visual aggregation to allow the viewer to both get a sense of aggregate properties as well as the details that form them. The detail view provides a 3D visualization of each protein surface coupled with interaction techniques designed to support key tasks, including spatial aggregation and automated camera touring. A prototype implementation of our approach is demonstrated on protein surface classifier experiments. | false | false | [
"Alper Sarikaya",
"Danielle Albers",
"Jake Mitchell",
"Michael Gleicher"
] | [] | [] | [] |
EuroVis | 2,014 | Volumetric Data Reduction in a Compressed Sensing Framework | 10.1111/cgf.12367 | In this paper, we investigate compressed sensing principles to devise an in‐situ data reduction framework for visualization of volumetric datasets. We exploit the universality of the compressed sensing framework and show that the proposed method offers a refinable data reduction approach for volumetric datasets. The accurate reconstruction is obtained from partial Fourier measurements of the original data that are sensed without any prior knowledge of specific feature domains for the data. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of surfacelets for efficient representation of volumetric data. Moreover, we establish that the accuracy of reconstruction can further improve once a more effective basis for a sparser representation of the data becomes available. | false | false | [
"Xie Xu",
"Elham Sakhaee",
"Alireza Entezari"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | A novel knee rehabilitation system for the home | 10.1145/2556288.2557353 | In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of an interactive home-based rehabilitation visualisation system used by a wide variety of ages (users in our studies were aged from 47-89) to undertake rehabilitation in the home following knee replacement surgery. We present the rehabilitation visualization system and the results of a randomized controlled study in which we investigated the usability and feasibility of the system in the home. We found that our users were able to use the system successfully for their rehabilitation with improved rehabilitation outcomes after 6 weeks when compared to the current rehabilitation care. Finally we highlight the lessons learned which will benefit prospective designers of home rehabilitation technology in ensuring successful home evaluations in clinical rehabilitation. | false | false | [
"Mobolaji Ayoade",
"Lynne Baillie"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | A user study of different gameplay visualizations | 10.1145/2556288.2557317 | With the rising interest in multiplayer gaming, gameplay statistics have become an increasingly important aspect of the overall game experience for many players. As a part of this trend, visualizations have gained great popularity among players, in particular heatmaps since they allow them to reenact the course of a game and to develop new strategies. In this paper we report results of a user study conducted with 29 players (i) to investigate how players use heatmaps and two further graphical representations that use clustering algorithms to interpret gameplay and (ii) to assess the three representations in regard to time efficiency, correctness, suitability, and player preference. Our results show that heatmaps were mainly used to detect hot spots while the cluster representations proved useful to compare variables, allowing the players to uncover relationships between them and in turn allowing a deeper insight into the gameplay data. | false | false | [
"Simone Kriglstein",
"Günter Wallner",
"Margit Pohl"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Addressing misconceptions about code with always-on programming visualizations | 10.1145/2556288.2557409 | We present Theseus, an IDE extension that visualizes run-time behavior within a JavaScript code editor. By displaying real-time information about how code actually behaves during execution, Theseus proactively addresses misconceptions by drawing attention to similarities and differences between the programmer's idea of what code does and what it actually does. To understand how programmers would respond to this kind of an always-on visualization, we ran a lab study with graduate students, and interviewed 9 professional programmers who were asked to use Theseus in their day-to-day work. We found that users quickly adopted strategies that are unique to always-on, real-time visualizations, and used the additional information to guide their navigation through their code. | false | false | [
"Thomas Lieber",
"Joel R. Brandt",
"Robert C. Miller"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Automatic generation of semantic icon encodings for visualizations | 10.1145/2556288.2557408 | Authors use icon encodings to indicate the semantics of categorical information in visualizations. The default icon libraries found in visualization tools often do not match the semantics of the data. Users often manually search for or create icons that are more semantically meaningful. This process can hinder the flow of visual analysis, especially when the amount of data is large, leading to a suboptimal user experience. We propose a technique for automatically generating semantically relevant icon encodings for categorical dimensions of data points. The algorithm employs natural language processing in order to find relevant imagery from the Internet. We evaluate our approach on Mechanical Turk by generating large libraries of icons using Tableau Public workbooks that represent real analytical effort by people out in the world. Our results show that the automatic algorithm does nearly as well as the manually created icons, and particularly has higher user satisfaction for larger cardinalities of data. | false | false | [
"Vidya Setlur",
"Jock D. Mackinlay"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Coding livecoding | 10.1145/2556288.2557049 | Livecoding is an artistic programming practice in which an artist's low-level interaction can be observed with sufficiently high fidelity to allow for transcription and analysis. This paper presents the first reported "coding" of livecoding videos. From an identified corpus of videos available on the web, we coded performances of two different livecoding artists, recording both the (textual) programming edit events and the musical effect of these edits. Our analysis includes a novel, transition-matrix visualisation of the textual and musical dimensions of this data to create a "performer fingerprint". We show how detailed transcriptions of livecoding videos can be made which, we hope, will provide a foundation for further research into describing and understanding livecoding. | false | false | [
"Ben Swift",
"Andrew Sorensen",
"Michael A. Martin",
"Henry J. Gardner"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Crowdsourcing step-by-step information extraction to enhance existing how-to videos | 10.1145/2556288.2556986 | Millions of learners today use how-to videos to master new skills in a variety of domains. But browsing such videos is often tedious and inefficient because video player interfaces are not optimized for the unique step-by-step structure of such videos. This research aims to improve the learning experience of existing how-to videos with step-by-step annotations. We first performed a formative study to verify that annotations are actually useful to learners. We created ToolScape, an interactive video player that displays step descriptions and intermediate result thumbnails in the video timeline. Learners in our study performed better and gained more self-efficacy using ToolScape versus a traditional video player. To add the needed step annotations to existing how-to videos at scale, we introduce a novel crowdsourcing workflow. It extracts step-by-step structure from an existing video, including step times, descriptions, and before and after images. We introduce the Find-Verify-Expand design pattern for temporal and visual annotation, which applies clustering, text processing, and visual analysis algorithms to merge crowd output. The workflow does not rely on domain-specific customization, works on top of existing videos, and recruits untrained crowd workers. We evaluated the workflow with Mechanical Turk, using 75 cooking, makeup, and Photoshop videos on YouTube. Results show that our workflow can extract steps with a quality comparable to that of trained annotators across all three domains with 77% precision and 81% recall. | false | false | [
"Juho Kim",
"Phu Tran Nguyen",
"Sarah A. Weir",
"Philip J. Guo",
"Robert C. Miller",
"Krzysztof Z. Gajos"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | DemoWiz: re-performing software demonstrations for a live presentation | 10.1145/2556288.2557254 | Showing a live software demonstration during a talk can be engaging, but it is often not easy: presenters may struggle with (or worry about) unexpected software crashes and encounter issues such as mismatched screen resolutions or faulty network connectivity. Furthermore, it can be difficult to recall the steps to show while talking and operating the system all at the same time. An alternative is to present with pre-recorded screencast videos. It is, however, challenging to precisely match the narration to the video when using existing video players. We introduce DemoWiz, a video presentation system that provides an increased awareness of upcoming actions through glanceable visualizations. DemoWiz supports better control of timing by overlaying visual cues and enabling lightweight editing. A user study shows that our design significantly improves the presenters' perceived ease of narration and timing compared to a system without visualizations that was similar to a standard playback control. Furthermore, nine (out of ten) participants preferred DemoWiz over the standard playback control with the last expressing no preference. | false | false | [
"Pei-Yu Chi",
"Bongshin Lee",
"Steven Mark Drucker"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Dive in!: enabling progressive loading for real-time navigation of data visualizations | 10.1145/2556288.2557195 | We introduce Splash, a framework reducing development overhead for both data curators and visualization developers of client-server visualization systems. Splash streamlines the process of creating a multiple level-of-detail version of the data and facilitates progressive data download, thereby enabling real-time, on-demand navigation with existing visualization toolkits. As a result, system responsiveness is increased and the user experience is improved. We demonstrate the benefit of progressive loading for user interaction on slower networks. Additionally, case study evaluations of Splash with real-world data curators suggest that Splash supports iterative refinement of visualizations and promotes the use of exploratory data analysis. | false | false | [
"Michael Glueck",
"Azam Khan",
"Daniel J. Wigdor"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Effects of display size and navigation type on a classification task | 10.1145/2556288.2557020 | The advent of ultra-high resolution wall-size displays and their use for complex tasks require a more systematic analysis and deeper understanding of their advantages and drawbacks compared with desktop monitors. While previous work has mostly addressed search, visualization and sense-making tasks, we have designed an abstract classification task that involves explicit data manipulation. Based on our observations of real uses of a wall display, this task represents a large category of applications. We report on a controlled experiment that uses this task to compare physical navigation in front of a wall-size display with virtual navigation using pan-and-zoom on the desktop. Our main finding is a robust interaction effect between display type and task difficulty: while the desktop can be faster than the wall for simple tasks, the wall gains a sizable advantage as the task becomes more difficult. A follow-up study shows that other desktop techniques (overview+detail, lens) do not perform better than pan-and-zoom and are therefore slower than the wall for difficult tasks. | false | false | [
"Can Liu 0003",
"Olivier Chapuis",
"Michel Beaudouin-Lafon",
"Eric Lecolinet",
"Wendy E. Mackay"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | End-users publishing structured information on the web: an observational study of what, why, and how | 10.1145/2556288.2557036 | End-users are accustomed to filtering and browsing styled collections of data on professional web sites, but they have few ways to create and publish such information architectures for themselves. This paper presents a full-lifecycle analysis of the Exhibit framework - an end-user tool which provides such functionality - to understand the needs, capabilities, and practices of this class of users. We include interviews, as well as analysis of over 1,800 visualizations and 200,000 web interactions with these visualizations. Our analysis reveals important findings about this user population which generalize to the task of providing better end-user structured content publication tools. | false | false | [
"Edward Benson",
"David R. Karger"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Faces engage us: photos with faces attract more likes and comments on Instagram | 10.1145/2556288.2557403 | Photos are becoming prominent means of communication online. Despite photos' pervasive presence in social media and online world, we know little about how people interact and engage with their content. Understanding how photo content might signify engagement, can impact both science and design, influencing production and distribution. One common type of photo content that is shared on social media, is the photos of people. From studies of offline behavior, we know that human faces are powerful channels of non-verbal communication. In this paper, we study this behavioral phenomena online. We ask how presence of a face, it's age and gender might impact social engagement on the photo. We use a corpus of 1 million Instagram images and organize our study around two social engagement feedback factors, likes and comments. Our results show that photos with faces are 38% more likely to receive likes and 32% more likely to receive comments, even after controlling for social network reach and activity. We find, however, that the number of faces, their age and gender do not have an effect. This work presents the first results on how photos with human faces relate to engagement on large scale image sharing communities. In addition to contributing to the research around online user behavior, our findings offer a new line of future work using visual analysis. | false | false | [
"Saeideh Bakhshi",
"David A. Shamma",
"Eric Gilbert"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Highlighting interventions and user differences: informing adaptive information visualization support | 10.1145/2556288.2557141 | There is increasing evidence that the effectiveness of information visualization techniques can be impacted by the particular needs and abilities of each user. This suggests that it is important to investigate information visualization systems that can dynamically adapt to each user. In this paper, we address the question of how to adapt. In particular, we present a study to evaluate a variety of visual prompts, called "interventions", that can be performed on a visualization to help users process it. Our results show that some of the tested interventions perform better than a condition in which no intervention is provided, both in terms of task performance as well as subjective user ratings. We also discuss findings on how intervention effectiveness is influenced by individual differences and task complexity. | false | false | [
"Giuseppe Carenini",
"Cristina Conati",
"Enamul Hoque",
"Ben Steichen",
"Dereck Toker",
"James T. Enns"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | In-your-face, yet unseen?: improving head-stabilized warnings to reduce reaction time | 10.1145/2556288.2557063 | One unique property of head-mounted displays (HMDs) is that content can easily be displayed at a fixed position within the user's field of view (head-stabilized). This ensures that critical information (e.g. warnings) is continuously visible and can, in principle, be perceived as quickly as possible. We examined this strategy with a physically and visually distracted driver. We ran two consecutive studies in a driving simulator, comparing different warning visualizations in a head-up display (HUD) and a HMD. In an initial study, we found no significant effects of warning type or display technology on the reaction times. In a second study, after modifying our visualization to include a visual reference marker, we found that with only this minor change, reaction times were significantly lower in the HMD when compared to the HUD. Our insights can help others design better head-stabilized notifications. | false | false | [
"Felix Lauber",
"Andreas Butz"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | ISSE: an interactive source separation editor | 10.1145/2556288.2557253 | Traditional audio editing tools do not facilitate the task of separating a single mixture recording (e.g. pop song) into its respective sources (e.g. drums, vocal, etc.). Such ability, however, would be very useful for a wide variety of audio applications such as music remixing, audio denoising, and audio-based forensics. To address this issue, we present ISSE - an interactive source separation editor. ISSE is a new open-source, freely available, and cross-platform audio editing tool that enables a user to perform source separation by painting on time-frequency visualizations of sound, resulting in an interactive machine learning system. The system brings to life our previously proposed interaction paradigm and separation algorithm that learns from user-feedback to perform separation. For evaluation, we conducted user studies and compared results between inexperienced and expert users. For a variety of real-world tasks, we found that inexperienced users can achieve good separation quality with minimal instruction and expert users can achieve state-of-the-art separation quality. | false | false | [
"Nicholas J. Bryan",
"Gautham J. Mysore",
"Ge Wang 0002"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Kinetica: naturalistic multi-touch data visualization | 10.1145/2556288.2557231 | Over the last several years there has been an explosion of powerful, affordable, multi-touch devices. This provides an outstanding opportunity for novel data visualization techniques that leverage new interaction methods and minimize their barriers to entry. In this paper we describe an approach for multivariate data visualization that uses physics-based affordances that are easy to intuit, constraints that are easy to apply and visualize, and a consistent view as data is manipulated in order to promote data exploration and interrogation. We provide a framework for exploring this problem space, and an example proof of concept system called Kinetica. We describe the results of a user study that suggest users of Kinetica were able to explore multiple dimensions of data at once, identify outliers, and discover trends with minimal training. | false | false | [
"Jeffrey M. Rzeszotarski",
"Aniket Kittur"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Monadic exploration: seeing the whole through its parts | 10.1145/2556288.2557083 | Monadic exploration is a new approach to interacting with relational information spaces that challenges the distinction between the whole and its parts. Building on the work of sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour we turn to the concept of the monad as a useful lens on online communities and collections that expands the possibility for creating meaning in their navigation. While existing interfaces tend to emphasize either the structure of the whole or details of a part, monadic exploration brings these opposing perspectives closer together in continuous movements between partially overlapping points of view. We present a visualization that reflects a given node's relative position within a network using radial displacements and visual folding. To investigate the potential of monadic exploration we report on an iterative design process of a web-based visualization of a highly cross-referenced book and its six-month deployment. | false | false | [
"Marian Dörk",
"Rob Comber",
"Martyn Dade-Robertson"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | NewsViews: an automated pipeline for creating custom geovisualizations for news | 10.1145/2556288.2557228 | Interactive visualizations add rich, data-based context to online news articles. Geographic maps are currently the most prevalent form of these visualizations. Unfortunately, designers capable of producing high-quality, customized geovisualizations are scarce. We present NewsViews, a novel automated news visualization system that generates interactive, annotated maps without requiring professional designers. NewsViews' maps support trend identification and data comparisons relevant to a given news article. The NewsViews system leverages text mining to identify key concepts and locations discussed in articles (as well as potential annotations), an extensive repository of 'found' databases, and techniques adapted from cartography to identify and create visually 'interesting' thematic maps. In this work, we develop and evaluate key criteria in automatic, annotated, map generation and experimentally validate the key features for successful representations (e.g., relevance to context, variable selection, 'interestingness' of representation and annotation quality). | false | false | [
"Tong Gao",
"Jessica Hullman",
"Eytan Adar",
"Brent J. Hecht",
"Nicholas Diakopoulos"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Permulin: mixed-focus collaboration on multi-view tabletops | 10.1145/2556288.2557405 | We contribute Permulin, an integrated set of interaction and visualization techniques for multi-view tabletops to support co-located collaboration across a wide variety of collaborative coupling styles. These techniques (1) provide support both for group work and for individual work, as well as for the transitions in-between, (2) contribute sharing and peeking techniques to support mutual awareness and group coordination during phases of individual work, (3) reduce interference during group work on a group view, and (4) directly integrate with conventional multi-touch input. We illustrate our techniques in a proof-of-concept implementation with the two example applications of map navigation and photo collages. Results from two user studies demonstrate that Permulin supports fluent transitions between individual and group work and exhibits unique awareness properties that allow participants to be highly aware of each other during tightly coupled collaboration, while being able to unobtrusively perform individual work during loosely coupled collaboration. | false | false | [
"Roman Lissermann",
"Jochen Huber",
"Martin Schmitz",
"Jürgen Steimle",
"Max Mühlhäuser"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Pervasive information through constant personal projection: the ambient mobile pervasive display (AMP-D) | 10.1145/2556288.2557365 | The vision of pervasive ambient information displays which show relevant information has not yet come true. One of the main reasons is the limited number of available displays in the environment which is a fundamental requirement of the original vision. We introduce the concept of an Ambient Mobile Pervasive Display AMP-D which is a wearable projector system that constantly projects an ambient information display in front of the user. The floor display provides serendipitous access to public and personal information. The display is combined with a projected display on the user's hand, forming a continuous interaction space that is controlled by hand gestures. The paper introduces this novel device concept, discusses its interaction design, and explores its advantages through various implemented application examples. Furthermore, we present the AMP-D prototype which illustrates the involved challenges concerning hardware, sensing, and visualization. | false | false | [
"Christian Winkler 0001",
"Julian Seifert",
"David Dobbelstein",
"Enrico Rukzio"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Sample-oriented task-driven visualizations: allowing users to make better, more confident decisions | 10.1145/2556288.2557131 | We often use datasets that reflect samples, but many visualization tools treat data as full populations. Uncertain visualizations are good at representing data distributions emerging from samples, but are more limited in allowing users to carry out decision tasks. This is because tasks that are simple on a traditional chart (e.g. "compare two bars") become a complex probabilistic task on a chart with uncertainty. We present guidelines for creating visual annotations for solving tasks with uncertainty, and an implementation that addresses five core tasks on a bar chart. A preliminary user study shows promising results: that users have a justified confidence in their answers with our system. | false | false | [
"Nivan Ferreira",
"Danyel Fisher",
"Arnd Christian König"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Show me the invisible: visualizing hidden content | 10.1145/2556288.2557032 | Content on computer screens is often inaccessible to users because it is hidden, e.g., occluded by other windows, outside the viewport, or overlooked. In search tasks, the efficient retrieval of sought content is important. Current software, however, only provides limited support to visualize hidden occurrences and rarely supports search synchronization crossing application boundaries. To remedy this situation, we introduce two novel visualization methods to guide users to hidden content. Our first method generates awareness for occluded or out-of-viewport content using see-through visualization. For content that is either outside the screen's viewport or for data sources not opened at all, our second method shows off-screen indicators and an on-demand smart preview. To reduce the chances of overlooking content, we use visual links, i.e., visible edges, to connect the visible content or the visible representations of the hidden content. We show the validity of our methods in a user study, which demonstrates that our technique enables a faster localization of hidden content compared to traditional search functionality and thereby assists users in information retrieval tasks. | false | false | [
"Thomas Geymayer",
"Markus Steinberger",
"Alexander Lex",
"Marc Streit",
"Dieter Schmalstieg"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Smarties: an input system for wall display development | 10.1145/2556288.2556956 | Wall-sized displays can support data visualization and collaboration, but making them interactive is challenging. Smarties allows wall application developers to easily add interactive support to their collaborative applications. It consists of an interface running on touch mobile devices for input, a communication protocol between devices and the wall, and a library that implements the protocol and handles synchronization, locking and input conflicts. The library presents the input as an event loop with callback functions. Each touch mobile has multiple cursor controllers, each associated with keyboards, widgets and clipboards. These controllers can be assigned to specific tasks, are persistent in nature, and can be shared by multiple collaborating users for sharing work. They can control simple cursors on the wall application, or specific content (objects or groups of them). The types of associated widgets are decided by the wall application, making the mobile interface customizable by the wall application it connects to. | false | false | [
"Olivier Chapuis",
"Anastasia Bezerianos",
"Stelios Frantzeskakis"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | SonicExplorer: fluid exploration of audio parameters | 10.1145/2556288.2557206 | In digital music production, the phrase "in the box" refers to the increasing replacement of extraneous hardware devices with compatible software components. As controls move from hard to soft, we have seen an increase in usability issues for musicians and sound engineers dealing with a large number of temporal inputs and both continuous and discrete controls. We present the SonicExplorer application, which we developed to give users a new interface for exploring and manipulating audio. SonicExplorer leverages users' spatial and color perception to enhance exploration by visualizing the parameter space and providing implicit memory cues. The application also leverages bimanual input to aid in fluid exploration of multidimensional audio parameter spaces, and to minimize the need for switching between parameters. | false | false | [
"Alexander Travis Adams",
"Berto Gonzalez",
"Celine Latulipe"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Structuring the space: a study on enriching node-link diagrams with visual references | 10.1145/2556288.2557112 | Exploring large visualizations that do not fit in the screen raises orientation and navigation challenges. Structuring the space with additional visual references such as grids or contour lines provide spatial landmarks that may help viewers form a mental model of the space. However, previous studies report mixed results regarding their utility. While some evidence showed that grid and other visual embellishments improve memorability, experiments with contour lines suggest otherwise. In this work, we describe an evaluation framework to capture the impact of introducing visual references in node-link diagrams. We present the results of three controlled experiments that deepen our understanding on enriching large visualization spaces with visual structures. In particular, we provide the first tangible evidence that contour lines have significant benefits when navigating large node-link diagrams. | false | false | [
"Basak Alper",
"Nathalie Henry Riche",
"Tobias Höllerer"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Supporting learners in collecting and exploring data from immersive simulations in collective inquiry | 10.1145/2556288.2557162 | Digitally augmented physical spaces (e.g., smart classrooms) offer opportunities to engage students in novel and potentially transformative learning experiences. This paper presents an immersive rainforest simulation and collective inquiry activity where students collect observational data from the environment and explore their peers' data through large visualization displays and personal mobile devices. Two iterations of the design were tested, which resulted in higher quality student explanations constructed. Images were found to be an important source of evidence for the explanations, more so than text-only evidence. We also found that patterns of collective ideas influenced student performance, and that visualizations, as ambient or plenary displays, supported both teacher and students in reviewing patterns of collected data. | false | false | [
"Michelle Lui",
"Alex C. Kuhn",
"Alisa Acosta",
"Chris Quintana",
"James D. Slotta"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Supporting the design and fabrication of physical visualizations | 10.1145/2556288.2557310 | Physical visualizations come in increasingly diverse forms, and are used in domains including art and entertainment, business analytics, and scientific research. However, creating physical visualizations requires laborious craftsmanship and demands expertise in both data visualization and digital fabrication. We present three case studies that illustrate limitations of current visualization fabrication workflows. We then present MakerVis, a prototype tool that integrates the entire process of creating physical visualizations, from data filtering to physical fabrication. Design sessions with three end users demonstrate how tools such as MakerVis can dramatically lower the barriers to producing physical visualizations. Observations and interviews from these sessions highlighted future research areas, including customization support, using material properties to represent data variables, and allowing the reuse of physical data objects in new visualizations. | false | false | [
"Saiganesh Swaminathan",
"Conglei Shi",
"Yvonne Jansen",
"Pierre Dragicevic",
"Lora Oehlberg",
"Jean-Daniel Fekete"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Task-driven evaluation of aggregation in time series visualization | 10.1145/2556288.2557200 | Many visualization tasks require the viewer to make judgments about aggregate properties of data. Recent work has shown that viewers can perform such tasks effectively, for example to efficiently compare the maximums or means over ranges of data. However, this work also shows that such effectiveness depends on the designs of the displays. In this paper, we explore this relationship between aggregation task and visualization design to provide guidance on matching tasks with designs. We combine prior results from perceptual science and graphical perception to suggest a set of design variables that influence performance on various aggregate comparison tasks. We describe how choices in these variables can lead to designs that are matched to particular tasks. We use these variables to assess a set of eight different designs, predicting how they will support a set of six aggregate time series comparison tasks. A crowd-sourced evaluation confirms these predictions. These results not only provide evidence for how the specific visualizations support various tasks, but also suggest using the identified design variables as a tool for designing visualizations well suited for various types of tasks. | false | false | [
"Danielle Albers",
"Michael Correll",
"Michael Gleicher"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | The role of interactive biclusters in sensemaking | 10.1145/2556288.2557337 | Visual exploration of relationships within large, textual datasets is an important aid for human sensemaking. By understanding computed, structural relationships between entities of different types (e.g., people and locations), users can leverage domain expertise and intuition to determine the importance and relevance of these relationships for tasks, such as intelligence analysis. Biclusters are a potentially desirable method to facilitate this, because they reveal coordinated relationships that can represent meaningful relationships. Bixplorer, a visual analytics prototype, supports interactive exploration of textual datasets in a spatial workspace with biclusters. In this paper, we present results of a study that analyzes how users interact with biclusters to solve an intelligence analysis problem using Bixplorer. We found that biclusters played four principal roles in the analytical process: an effective starting point for analysis, a revealer of two levels of connections, an indicator of potentially important entities, and a useful label for clusters of organized information. | false | false | [
"Maoyuan Sun",
"Lauren Bradel",
"Christopher L. North",
"Naren Ramakrishnan"
] | [] | [] | [] |
CHI | 2,014 | Traffigram: distortion for clarification via isochronal cartography | 10.1145/2556288.2557224 | Most geographic maps visually represent physical distance; however, travel time can in some cases be more important than distance because it directly indicates availability. The technique of creating maps from temporal data is known as isochronal cartography, and is a form of distortion for clarification. In an isochronal map, congestion expands areas, while ideal travel conditions make the map shrink in comparison to the actual distance scale of a traditional map. Although there have been many applications of this technique, detailed user studies of its efficacy remain scarce, and there are conflicting views on its practical value. To attempt to settle this issue, we utilized a user-centered design process to determine which features of isochronal cartography might be most usable in practice. We developed an interactive cartographic visualization system, Traffigram, that features a novel combination of efficient isochronal map algorithms and an interface designed to give map users a quick and seamless experience while preserving geospatial integrity and aesthetics. We validated our design choices with multiple usability studies. We present our results and discuss implications for design. | false | false | [
"Sungsoo (Ray) Hong",
"Yea-Seul Kim",
"Jong-Chul Yoon",
"Cecilia R. Aragon"
] | [] | [] | [] |
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