mindspill

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.

Using faces to display data

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:08:01 GMT

Dr. Steve C Wang used a data visualization technique called Chernoff faces to display some characteristic of baseball managers in 2007. The technique was developed by Herman Chernoff in 1973, and the idea behind it is to display different data attributes as facial features such as curvature of the mouth, length of nose, direction of eyebrows. In Dr Wang’s graphic, the number of lineups used by the manager is the length of face, width of eyes and ears; the number of pinch-hitters is the width of the hair, and the width of the face. Using this technique one can display many different attributes of a data set in a single face then allow the user to compare the different faces to analyse the data. In fact Chernoff claims that up to 18 data elements can be displayed using this method, allowing the user to visually cluster the data.

How effective are Chernoff faces in conveying information? Maybe the faces do not covey information at first glance, and they need a lot of referencing to the face legend, however I think they make an interesting and fun way of displaying information. The sole fact that this technique made the pages of the NY Times is enough proof of this. I’m sure that if the same data was displayed with bar graphs and pie charts it wouldn’t make any headlines. Most user studies in visualisation take into account the efficiency (speed in answering / accuracy of answer) of the technique, however techniques like Chernoff face maybe aren’t suited for answering questions fast, but they are catchy and media friendly.

More on Chernoff Faces
   Critique by Robert Kosara
   An Experimental Analysis of the Effectiveness of Features in Chernoff Faces
   Chernoff Faces in Psychology

Implementation
   Java
   R
   Excel

Data Mining and Info Vis for this week

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:55:20 GMT

Nat Torkington from O'Reilly Radar published an interesting weekly roundup post of the Data Mining and Visualization posts. The most interesting posts mentioned are: Catching a poker cheat with data mining, SNA toolkit for R and a link to a machine learning blog called Machine Learning (Theory)

175 Visualization Resources

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:12:28 GMT

The title says it all really. Meryl.net published a a very long list of visualization examples, blogs, influential vis people. Worth a look.

In no. 28 there's the Felton Annual report which I was planning to blog about, some time in the future. It's a personal annual report presented in a very creative way.