Mindpsill - Technology

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.

Yesterday I arrived in Ohio for the VisWeek 2008 Conference. Just a brief hello from the conference, hopefully even though doubtfully I'll write a bit about the salient interesting points. (Note: These will only be posted in the tech section).

Updates!

• Day 1
• Critics in the InfoVis community

While eating my fish & chips I found this quote from the article "What reading Tufte won't teach you":-

This has been sitting in my inbox for quite a while, but it ties in perfectly with the IBM LanguageWare project mentioned of the previous post.

The (DERI) is publishing over 10 years of forum posts, from the busiest Irish forum (boards.ie). There are over 9 million documents, worth about 50 gigabytes of disk space in RDF/XML format. All you have to do to be eligible for the prize is to create something interesting with the data.

More information on the competition on the SIOC wiki.

IBM have recently released a set of interesting text analysis tools for Eclipse. The description of IBM LanguageWare is very promising, and will undoubtedly be helpful for anybody working in text analytics. It'll probably have been very helpful when I was working on the Newspaper Information Extraction project.

From the IBM Website:-

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.

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