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Meetups

VIS Newcomers

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23
12:20 - 12:45 PM
Location: Latrobe Organizers: Jagoda Walny and Kate Isaacs

Attending VIS for the first time can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know very many people attending and/or are attending your first conference. The VIS Newcomers Meetup is an orientation and informal lunch intended for first-time VIS attendees to meet other conference goers and learn from the experiences of others. This Meetup will start with a short presentation containing conference-going tips (with a VIS leaning) gathered from other attendees’ previous experiences. Following this presentation, Meetup attendees will split into groups led by volunteer lunch leaders — experienced VIS attendees — and will venture into the surrounding area to continue their discussion over lunch. (Everyone pays for their own lunch). This Meetup is designed primarily with students in mind, but all are welcome.

Visualization and the city

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23
6:00 - 8:00 PM
Location: Peale C
Organizer: Marian Dörk

Ranging from visualizations that reveal the rhythms of a city’s infrastructure to showing the traces of its cultural heritage, a new subfield of visualization seems to be emerging that is concerned with urban data. Urban visualizations can vary widely with regard to their approach from empirical and scientific to artistic and activist. Especially politically it seems that attention is moving to the urban level, where not only most of the causes for global crises such as climate change can be found, but also their most promising solutions. Just a few days before IEEE VIS, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (UN HABITAT III) will be held in Quito, Ecuador. There is a growing recognition of the power that visualization can play in informing public discourse and decision-making - especially at the level of cities.

On the one hand, this informal meetup is an opportunity to look back to Quito and explore how the visualization community can engage with pressing questions about urban sustainability. On the other hand, the meetup brings visualization researchers, teachers, and practitioners together that are working on making different layers of the city visible, interpretable, and explorable. The meetup is meant to offer a casual place to identify colleagues working with similar data and exchanging experiences in their research and teaching efforts. Anyone interested in the topic is welcome to join.

Planning for the China-UK Big Data, Visualization & Analytics Summit

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24 6:00PM - 8:00PM Location: Peale C Organizers: Xiaoru Yuan and Kai Xu

The meetup is to plan a possible summit in China to initiate and steer the collaboration between universities, companies, and government agencies from both China and United Kingdom on big data, visualization and visual analytics to supporting government management and policy. We hope it can be helpful for the sustainable development of China, and be beneficial for participants from both countries and both academia and industry.

Intro to H2O.ai : Spice up VIS with Machine Learning

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25
12:00PM - 2:00PM
Location: Peale C
Organizer: Ivy Wang

H2O is an open source, distributed machine learning (ML) platform designed for big data, with the added benefit that it’s easy to use on a laptop (in addition to multi-node cluster capabilities). The core machine learning (ML) algorithms of H2O are implemented in high-performance Java, however, fully-featured APIs are available in R, Python, Scala, REST/JSON, and also through a web UI (Flow). In this meetup, we will introduce how to get started with this easy-to-use open source library. We will explore ways H2O.ai can help with your VIS projects. Join in to discuss the possibilities, benefits of ML and how VIS can better explain and facilitate ML processes.

The IEEE VIS Doctoral Colloquium – Information about the Organisation and Exchange of Experiences

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25
4:00PM - 6:00PM
Location: Peale C
Organizer: Tatiana von Landesberger, Pierre Dragicevic and Elisabeta Marai

The meetup will inform interested PhD students about the IEEE VIS Doctoral Colloquium. The colloquium will allow students to discuss their research directions in a supportive atmosphere with a panel of distinguished leaders and with their peers. Students can expect helpful feedback and fresh perspectives on their research topics and possible career paths, and will have the opportunity to interact closely with expert researchers in their field. In the meetup the organizers of this years’ colloquium will provide information about who should apply, how submissions should look like and what to consider for the representations in the colloquium. There is also the possibility to exchange information with successful applicants of previous years.

Visualization and Visual Analytics for Enterprise Intelligence

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25
6:00PM - 8:00PM
Location: Peale C
Organizer: Rahul C. Basole and Joern Kohlhammer

In this meetup, we hope to convene researchers and practitioners interested in designing, developing, and applying visualization and visual analytics for enterprise intelligence. Enterprise intelligence refers to defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the business environment needed to support executives and managers making operational, tactical, and strategic decisions for an organization. We aim to discuss opportunities and challenges, exchange ideas on current research projects, and the general state of visualization and visual analytics in today’s enterprise intelligence practice. This meetup builds on two successful BusinessVis workshops at VIS in 2014 and 2015.

Visualization in Healthcare

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25
6:30PM – 8:00PM
Location: Latrobe
Organizer: Jesus J Caban

In this meet-up, we would like to provide a networking opportunity to VIS 2016 researchers and practitioners interested in the design and validation of visualization techniques applied to healthcare data and EHR (Electronic Health Records) systems. After seven years of the annual Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare (including VIS 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2015), what are still the open challenges and opportunities?

VisLies: The Tradition Continues!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25
7:00PM - 9:00PM
Location: Ruth
Organizer: Georges Grinstein, Bernice Rogowitz and Ken Moorland

Please join us on Tuesday night, October 25th, for VisLies. This fun and engaging evening session showcases examples of egregious perceptual, cognitive, and conceptual errors in visualization, presented by members of the Vis community. Examples from our own work, from published papers, and from the internet highlight the many ways the visual representation can misrepresent the underlying phenomena in the data. This is a great opportunity for amusement and for learning, and every year we walk away with a smile on our faces and​ insights that may one day save the world.​

If you want to present at VisLies, please visit our web site: VisLies. Or, sign up directly here. Our twitter hashtag is #VisLies.

Blogging and Podcasting Meetup

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26
Time: 1:00PM - 3:00PM
Location: Peale C
Organizer: Robert Kosara, Enrico Bertini and Jessica Hullman

When you look around online, you find a lot of colorful pictures but little reliable information about visualization or visualization research. This is unfortunate for several reasons: many people are interested in learning more about how visualization works and what is going on in visualization research, and even many researchers want to read about interesting new work in a more casual format. The only people who can change that are the members of the visualization community themselves.

The goal of this meetup is to get people who are thinking about blogging or podcasting talking to each other, and to some of the people who have been doing this for a while. We want to reflect on experiences and lessons learned, answer questions, and lead a discussion between attendees.

Some topics we want to cover:

  • Why blog? (exposure, promote research, educate the public, etc.)
  • How to get started
  • Writing for blogs versus research papers
  • Will blogging kill your chances to graduate/get tenure/advance in live? (no)
  • Individual or group blog?
  • What to blog about?
  • Podcasting vs. blogging vs. … ?
  • Blogging platforms and their pros and cons (Wordpress vs. Medium vs. others)

Huge Unused Reserves of Visual Analytics

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26
4:30PM - 6:00PM
Location: Peale C
Organizer: Vladimir Grishin

The most visual analytics (VA) researches of multi-dimensional data use human visual perception very poorly. Researcher visually estimates just a few features of point clouds, if it is a projection as Principal Component, MD Scaling, etc., or of hundreds overlapping vectors in parallel coordinates (PCs). These are with losses of most information of initial data and without real usage of main vision power, i.e. 2-D form perception, which allows comparing hundreds vectors by hundreds invariant features of their lossless display as PCs or “stars”. Usage of such real VA has allowed us: (i) revealing of nonlinear data space structures with dimension up to 1000; (ii) early prognosis of emergencies of technological systems, heart diseases, etc.; and gives better results of statistical analysis due to better qualitative data models.

Velo Club de VIS

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27
6:00PM - 7:00PM
Location: Peale C
Organizer: Jason Dykes

A chance for VIS cyclists to discuss cycling and to prepare and sign on for Le Tour de VIS - the IEEE VIS post-conference road ride. This year it will be an 85km ride out of Baltimore on Saturday 29th. http://www.gicentre.net/velo-club-rides/