Behind the Scenes of IEEE VIS 2024: Change is Hard
In this blog post, I outline some of the changes we made to the VIS conference this year. I also elude to how we didn’t get nearly as far as we wanted.
Continue readingAssociate Professor, University of Utah
In this blog post, I outline some of the changes we made to the VIS conference this year. I also elude to how we didn’t get nearly as far as we wanted.
Continue readingIn this post, I provide a little context about the headache, which has been the hotel room block.
Continue readingIn this post, I discuss how VIS 2024 came to be in Florida and more specifically at the TradeWinds Island Grand.
Continue readingWe propose a new end-to-end framework to address these challenges that comprises a threefold contribution. First, we derive the critical point uncertainty in closed form, which is more accurate and efficient than the conventional MC sampling methods. Specifically, we provide the closed-form and semianalytical (a mix of closed-form and MC methods) solutions for parametric (e.g., uniform, Epanechnikov) and nonparametric models (e.g., histograms) with finite support. Second, we accelerate critical point probability computations using a parallel implementation with the VTK-m library, which is platform portable. Finally, we demonstrate the integration of our implementation with the ParaView software system to demonstrate near-real-time results for real datasets.
Continue readingIn this paper, we evaluated over 1,800 static annotated charts to understand how people annotate visualizations in practice. Through qualitative coding of these diverse real-world annotated charts, we explored three primary aspects of annotation usage patterns: analytic purposes for chart annotations (e.g., present, identify, summarize, or compare data features), mechanisms for chart annotations (e.g., types and combinations of annotations used, frequency of different annotation types across chart types, etc.), and the data source used to generate the annotations. We then synthesized our findings into a design space of annotations, highlighting key design choices for chart annotations.
Continue readingIn this study, we evaluate how visualization students annotate grouped bar charts when answering high-level questions about the data. The resulting annotations were qualitatively coded to generate a taxonomy of how they leverage different visual elements to communicate critical information. We found that the annotations used significantly varied by the task they were supporting and that whereas several annotation types supported many tasks, others were usable only in special cases. We also found that some tasks were so challenging that ensembles of annotations were necessary to support the tasks sufficiently. The resulting taxonomy of approaches provides a foundation for understanding the usage of annotations in broader contexts to help visualizations achieve their desired message.
Continue readingThis paper presents a prototype web application that generates visualizations to offer insights into issue timelines and reveals different factors related to issues. It focuses on the lifecycle of issues and depicts vital information to enhance users’ understanding of development patterns in their projects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through case studies involving three open-source GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we conducted a user evaluation to validate the efficacy of our prototype in conveying crucial repository information more efficiently and rapidly.
Continue readingThis study holistically explores visualization interpretation to examine the alignment between designers’ communicative goals and what their audience sees in a visualization, which we refer to as their textit{comprehension}. We found that statistics people effectively estimate from visualizations in classical graphical perception studies may differ from the patterns people intuitively comprehend in a visualization. We found that comprehension varies with a range of factors, including graph complexity and data distribution. Our study confirms the importance of defining visualization effectiveness from multiple perspectives to assess and inform visualization practices.
Continue readingWe introduce TopoX, a Python software suite that provides reliable and user-friendly building blocks for computing and machine learning on topological domains that extend graphs: hypergraphs, simplicial, cellular, path and combinatorial complexes. TopoX consists of three packages: TopoNetX facilitates constructing and computing on these domains, including working with nodes, edges and higher-order cells; TopoEmbedX provides methods to embed topological domains into vector spaces, akin to popular graph-based embedding algorithms such as node2vec; TopoModelX is built on top of PyTorch and offers a comprehensive toolbox of higher-order message passing functions for neural networks on topological domains.
Continue readingThis study looks at employing Naive Bayes modeling to analyze peer review data from an undergraduate visual literacy course over a five-year period (2017-2022). A key finding is the emphasis on the ‘lie factor’ in students’ comments when using the visual peer review rubric, highlighting areas for potential course content adaptation and instructional refinement. Our findings suggest that predictive modeling, as a tool to assess student comments, can provide novel insights into visual peer review. This could lead to impactful changes in course content, project modifications, and rubric enhancements, ultimately benefiting student learning and engagement in visual literacy courses.
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