mindspill

VAST 2008 Keynote - Christian Chabot

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:50:47 GMT

This year the VAST 2008 keynote was delivered by Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau Software. The main item on the agenda was to proof that Information Visualization is about to explode in popularity. Explode along the lines of the way Adobe products like Photoshop and Acrobat exploded. Explode in a sense that anyone who processes data, from huge companies, to small companies, to Joe the plumber, will be using visual analytic software.

Chabot made some very strong, at times ironic, at times provocative, comments about the state of information visualization. The main focus was about visualization in the industry, where his product is targeted. He showed some neat demos using Tableau, mainly stressing the simplicity of using a “traditional” visualization and interacting with it to get more information.

The approach he took was to try and dispel some strong myths about information visualization. One such myth was that people use information visualization to find hidden patterns in data. He said that the number 1 reason why people buy Tableau is to save time.

When an analyst uses a visualization to answer a question he typically ends up with another question. The users must then have the ability to answer that new question by either creating a new visualization or refining the original visualization. Since it’s so easy to create, or refine a new visualization in tableau, this alleviates the need to create a single complex visualization.

Another key point was that "Information Visualization is NOT as difficult much as you think". Most problems people are trying to solve on a daily basis can be easily solved by traditional visualizations. I tend to agree with this however that does not mean that we shouldn't try to solve bigger problems.

Some of the comments and argument made by Chabot were quite provocative. I found it quite strange that nobody from the InfoVis audience challenged what he said. I was expecting some sort of reaction which never came.

I cannot help but notice the usual split between industry and academics. It's something that always interests me a lot since I’m in sitting in between the two corners. At one extreme of the spectrum I see purely academic people trying to display a million node graph, without any practical application use. At the other extreme somebody is saying, information visualization is easy, just make it easily accessible and people will use it.

I think one of the nice things about the VisWeek conference is that it brings these two extremes and everything in between in a single room. I believe this is very beneficial for the overall community, both the academic community and industry. There is a huge amount of great work being done in the research community that can be exploited by industry, for the benefit of both parties.

I think one of the strengths of Tableau was that it built on a very solid foundation of Information Visualization, design and usability principles that were based on research. To this effect several papers have been published in this same conference about Tableau. I think more people and companies can benefit from being bridges between academic research and the industry.

Hopefully Chabot will be proved right in his prediction that Tableau will be the new Acrobat in the next 5 to 10 years. From personal experience with using the product, I think if there’s a product out there that is on the cusp of achieving this, then that product is in fact Tableau.

VisWeek 2008 - Day 1 Points

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:15:04 GMT

These are some of the interesting points discussed during events I attended. They’re a bit sketchy as they’re meant more as reminders than full blown posts.

Scatterplot Matrix Navigation (Niklas Elmqvist et al)

This paper was the winner of the best paper award. I think it might resurrect some interest with matrix scatterplots, and I see potential of using concepts from here in my work. I love matrix views, so needless to say this was a very interesting take on it. Need to look into the paper in further detail though.

Interaction Costs of InfoVis (Heidi Lam)

Review of user studies related to interaction costs. Made some valid points on the importance of considering interaction features when evaluating systems. Importance of interaction not being a cost but an aid. Something else to think about during user studies.

Color in Information Displays (Maureen Stone)

Tutorial on usage of colour in displays. Reiteration and emphasis on Tufte's principle to DO NO HARM with color. Presented two interesting cases studies on how colour was designed for Tableau and voting Kiosks. The subtle details of the design dependent on the application requirements were well explained in the case studies. Interesting point to follow-up on was the relationship of colour and language. Other points:-

Get it right in black and white - (Design Mantra)
Ref to work by Cynthia Brewer Color Brewer
Hand designing colour palettes vs Algorithmic generation in a color space
Emphasis and usage illustration of the L* (LAB) color space

VAST Challenge Participants discussion (Georges Grinstein, Catherine Plaisant, Mark Whiting et al)

Importance of creating data sets with ground truth.
Possibility of automatically judging analytical tasks.
Relevance of this area to an InfoVis Grand Challenge.

Critics in a community - VAST Challenge 2008 discussion

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:50:33 GMT

Yesterday was my first day, and also the first time at the VisWeek conference. Needless to say I was a bit overwhelmed by everything going on around, landing in a hotel surrounded by people I was in awe of (some of them are real humans), not knowing anybody and feeling like a Lilliputian amongst giants.

In the evening there was a discussion session about the VAST Challenge from all the participating teams (73 in total). This was the event I was most looking forward to, and the event I was hoping to get to meet some interesting people and make some new friends in the InfoVis community. So we sat down for the discussion and after a brief introduction the participants started making their comments. Comments from the participants started flying out like submachine gun fire, and the analogy isn't entirely out of place. It seemed that all anybody from the audience had to say was criticise the organisers.

I remember that when I was tackling the challenge, I found the dataset interesting, challenging and appreciated the work involved in generating it. Sitting there amongst the audience hearing all these negative things being thrown at the organisers, I almost felt that they were offending me. I went home thinking what a bunch of proud, arrogant, people. Is this the community I want to make part of?

I woke up this morning and I was still thinking about this. (It's 6am when I'm writing this). This morning though, maybe because of the caffeine dose, I started rationalizing. I thought, well, maybe a community needs critics. Maybe to improve something and make it better next year, there have to be people who criticise. Some of the criticism was valid, when you think of it rationally and leave your personal emotions behind. Needless to say though that some of the criticism was not constructive at all and was only a big dick wiggling exercise.

Thinking about it, I think critics do play a role in a community. Their suggestions can help improve the product each year, and I think that the VAST Challenge is a living proof of this, considering the great progress the challenge made since it started.

Having said this, being constructive, offering suggestions, and adding some sugar coating around the negative comments, doesn't hurt either. Your professional peers were involved in this work, so having some tact and showing appreciation is due. I'm sure that the vast majority of the people do appreciate but letting this appreciation be known is no harm.

Hopefully someday I will be up there doing something for the community, and I will be the one who gets criticised. When that day comes I hope to remember this first experience, and realise that criticism can be important for improving even though it can hurt. There are also people who do appreciate the work and think it's great, but usually these are the quiet ones.

Award in VAST 2008 Competition

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:43:40 GMT

I won an Award for the best node link animation in the VAST 2008 Competition. The competition consisted of a data set of phone calls between the families of the people running a controversial religious organisation, living on an island. The phone calls retrieved from the island's phone company, provided enough data to extract the social network of the families on the island. In addition to this, each phone record had the time of the call, the duration of the call, and the location of the cell tower from where the call was made.

The tool developed with Processing, was designed to allow easy exploration and interactive animation of a dynamic network. The network can be represented at different levels of detail. At an overview level, the whole network can be visualized using a matrix representation. From this overview, interesting detailed parts of the network can be zoomed upon, and explored, using a node-link representation. Finally, the individual nodes can be studied at an instance level.

The award was given due to the "innovative visualizations, excellent analysis, and outstanding functionality demonstrated in the visual analytic environments" shown.

P.S. Guess this explains why I was so quiet in June.

Security Visualizations Gallery

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:46:10 GMT

I haven't seen the SecVis site reviewed in the main infovis sites. I think some of my pals in the security industry will find this interesting.

It might also be worth to check out DAVIX, which is a collection of security visualization tools. It allows you to do things like build maps from pcap files, map protocol use in real time across a network, etc.

Via Dmiessler.com

Big Mac Exchange Rate Benchmark

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:46:22 GMT

The burger currency guideline from The Economist

Observing Cults

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:13:50 GMT

This is one of the first visualization research images I created. It's a composite image of the same cult network, represented in different ways. The whole network is represented as a pixel matrix. Part of the network is represented as a node-link graph diagram. Finally the graph is a detailed view of an individual node in the network.

Africa is big

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:01:57 GMT

From Strange Maps - Africa

Processing ported to Javascript

Fri, 09 May 2008 20:16:52 GMT

Processing is an easy to use programming language designed to make creating data visualizations easier. Processing simplifies the syntax of writing programs that draw graphics and use animation. The language was designed to be easy enough to be used by designers, to abstract most of the complication of writing the same functionality in Java. Each Processing application is finally converted into Java and can be either uploaded to a website as an applet or as a standalone Java program.

John Resig, has now ported the Processing language to Javascript. Using this library now you can write processing code that gets dynamically converted into Javascript and loaded directly in the browser, without having to load a Java Applet. Resig has a long list of examples using his Processing Javascript Library.

Baseball Visualizations

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:19:20 GMT

The new baseball season has just started and like every year the race is on to win the World Series. Baseball is probably the richest sport when it comes to statistical data and analysis, yet for a sport so rich in statistical data a search in the custom google data visualization search engine, and the infovis image search database yielded very few results. These are some of the more interesting baseball visualizations I found around.

Salary vs Performance - Ben Fry, one of the authors of the Processing programming language uses his freely available tool to visualize which baseball teams are spending their money well, and how does each team position changes over the course of the season? The last applet uploaded looks at the teams and their salaries in 2007.

Baseball Visualization Tool - This is a commercial tool that uses a pie chart to guide the manager whether to pull the pitcher or not. The fuller the pie chart the more the pitcher should be changed.

Baseball race - This visualization tracks the progress of each team in a season as the season progresses. The dataset used for this application starts from 1901 and continues till the present day. The data is freely available from Retrosheet, a baseball scores database.

Bivariate Baseball Score Plots - The bivariate baseball score plots present summary information for MLB teams game scores. The scores are visualized using a bivariate baseball score plot with each game being a point in a two-dimensional grid.

Chernoff Faces baseball managers - A visualization coming fresh off the press that uses Chernoff faces to display baseball manager stats. The features of the face like face height, width, nose size, mouth curvature, etc. change according to the values of the attributes they are representing.

Mitchell Report Visualization - In December 2007 a 409 page report was published detailing the use of steroids in Major League Baseball. A social network of connections between players and trainers mentioned in the Mitchell Report was created using Social Action, a tool developed by the HCI Lab of Maryland University.

Bill James - A video interview and a newspaper interview with the most popular baseball statistician, and also the inventor of the term used to describe baseball analysis - Sabremetrics.