Information Visualization and Visual Analytics in the II Lab

Information Visualization and Visual Analytics

Team Members: Youn ah Kang, Zhicheng Liu, Zach Pousman, John Stasko

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The research areas of Information Visualization (InfoVis) and Visual Analytics (VA) are one of our main foci in the II Lab. This work is all about presenting data visually in order to aid people in understanding and analyzing the data. Information visualization typically focuses on abstract data, that is, data without any agreed-upon depiction, such as financial data, text, statistics, databases, and software. Below are a number of the subareas within InfoVis and VA in which we are working. For a broad look at InfoVis/VA related links and information on the web, see our InfoVis web resources page.

Casual InfoVis - Traditional or "core" infovis typically refers to "deep-dive" analysis often done with sophisticated, multiple-view systems used for hours at a time to do complex analysis. Another style of infovis that we call Casual InfoVis, still involving the visualization of information, involves the use of visualizations for just a few moments at a time but very frequently. We are defining and exploring this new subarea of InfoVis.
InfoVis '07,

Interaction - InfoVis is made up of two main components: representation and interaction. Representation gets much more focus and is often thought of as more exciting. Interaction, the "little brother", does not receive as much focus, but we argue that it is crucial for InfoVis and harbors the potential for greater innovation in the future.
InfoVis '07,

User Tasks - Too often InfoVis is about innovative visual representations with little concern on whether those representations are actually useful to people. We have been promoting a more task- and analysis-centric view of the discipline, rather than a representation-centric view. In a paper at InfoVis '05, we identified a set of 10 low-level analytic tasks such as correlate, filter, cluster, etc., that characterize what people do when using infovis systems in data analysis. In papers in TVCG '05 and InfoVis '04, we posited a set of higher-level knowledge precepts that help bridge the analytic gaps between data representation and higher-level analytic tasks, such as forecasting, learning new domains, and cost-benefit analysis. For more details, see the vis tasks webpages.
InfoVis '05, TVCG '05, InfoVis '04

Evaluation - Evaluation has been a key theme of our research and we make sure to stress careful evaluation in all of the infovis projects from the lab. This topic is certainly related to our work on User Tasks, since clearly understanding what a person is trying to accomplish with a system is key to evaluating the system well.
BELIV '06, IJHCS '00,

Hierarchical Data - We have done a lot of work on visualizing hierarchies through different kinds of space-filling visualizations. In 2000, we introduced the SunBurst circular space-filling technique/system that uses animation to help drill down into the hierarchy and we compared SunBurst to the well-known Treemap technique. At InfoVis '03, we also introduced a variant of Treemaps called the Context Treemap that has been useful for portraying data sets like mutual fund portfolios.
InfoVis '03, IJHCS '00, InfoVis '00

Software Visualization - This is a large subarea of Information Visualization that involves visualization of software, both algorithms and programs, to help people better understand the software. We have been researching software visualization for twenty+ years, and our work is summarized in the SoftVis in GVU web pages. The softvis.org web pages provide further information about the area including links to the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization.

Information Security - Together with information security researchers at Georgia Tech, we have examined how visualization may assist information assurance and information security. We've developed systems for visualizing IDS alarm and network packets.
IEEE CG&A '06, VizSec '05, SOUPS '05

Education - John Stasko has been teaching CS 7450, a graduate course on Information Visualization, since 1999. His syllabus, lecture slides, assignments, and bibliographic entries are all provided on-line at the class website. Video recordings of almost all the class lectures from the course also are available in the Visual Analytics Digital Library.

Conferences - John is General Chair for IEEE InfoVis 2007, the premier conference about Information Visualization. He was Papers Co-Chair in 2005 and 2006. Some subset of Information Interfaces students always attend the conference and our group is an active paticipant year in-year out.

Past and Present InfoVis Systems Research Projects
Dust & Magnet - InfoVis via a magnet metaphor
Fund Explorer - Stock portfolio diversification through Context Treemaps
InfoCanvas - Peripheral information art
Information Mural - Squeezing large data sets into small views
NetVizor - Visualizing network topologies
SunBurst - Radial space-filling views of hierarchies
Tarantula - Testing and debugging large software systems