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Workshops

Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities

Sunday, Oct 21: 9:00am-6:00pm

Mennatallah El-Assady, University of Konstanz
Stefan Jänicke, Leipzig University
David Joseph Wrisley, New York University
Eric Alexander, Carleton College
Adam James Bradley, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Min Chen, University of Oxford
Uta Hinrichs, The University of St Andrews

Contact: menna.el-assady@uni.kn

We are witnessing a growth in collaborations between the humanities and computing. One only need to look to the media arts, visual communication, information visualization, and digital humanities to see exciting new examples of interdisciplinary research. In this year’s workshop, we hope to feature some of this visual innovation in the realm of applied visualization, as well as to explore new avenues for interdisciplinary and collaborative research between visualization and the humanities. We will explore different vocabularies and conceptual frameworks deployed by computer science on the one hand and the humanities on the other, and use these to think about how to engage differences, as potentially rich opportunities rather than seeing them as barriers.

Toward a Design Language for Data Physicalization

Sunday, Oct 21: 9:00am-12:40pm

Trevor Hogan, Cork Institute of Technology
Uta Hinrichs, University of St Andrews
Jason Alexander, Lancaster University
Samuel Huron, Mines-Telecom ParisTech
Sheelagh Carpendale, University of Calgary
Eva Hornecker, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Contact: trevor.hogan@cit.ie

The use of physical representations to facilitate communication, analysis, teaching, and research is as old as humanity. However, it is only in the past decade that data physicalization is being discussed as a dedicated form of research and design practice primarily concerned with the design of physical artefacts. For visualization, as the dominant form of data representation, established principles and taxonomies exist to guide designers. However, an equivalent design vocabulary has yet to be established for data physicalization. The aim of this workshop is to draw together practitioners and researchers to discuss different approaches toward a design language for data physicalization. Through a series of invited talks alternating with hands-on discussions of existing physicalization examples, the workshop will start to consolidate different efforts of characterizing and evaluating the core properties or “variables” that drive data physicalization, and to define a research agenda in this area.

Workshop on Visualization for Communication (VisComm)

Sunday, Oct 21: 9:00am-12:40pm

Robert Kosara, Tableau Research
Benjamin Watson, North Carolina State University

Contact: bwatson@ncsu.edu

While visualization research is still largely focused on data analysis, most people’s experience with visualization is in the form of communication and presentation, as seen now in publications such as the New York Times and from an independent community of visualization practitioners and bloggers. The VisComm workshop will bring together both practitioners and researchers from a broad range of disciplines to address the questions raised by visualization’s new communicative role. We encourage participation from journalists, designers and others that do not typically attend IEEE VIS and write academic manuscripts. Accordingly, we seek not only short papers but also visual case studies: one-page abstracts with video walkthroughs of communicative visualizations.

DSIA: Data Systems for Interactive Analysis

Sunday, Oct 21: 2:20pm-6:00pm

Dominik Moritz, University of Washington
Joseph Cottam, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Leilani Battle, University of Washington / University of Maryland
Marianne Procopio, Tufts University

Contact: organizers@interactive-analysis.org

DSIA brings together researchers at the intersection of databases, machine learning, and interactive visualization. These three areas have important things to say to each other. Modern data visualization depends on the cutting edge of both database and machine learning research: database researchers are exploring techniques for storing and querying massive amounts of data; machine learning techniques provide ways to discover unexpected patterns and to automate and scale well-defined analysis procedures. This workshop explores the idea that the next generation of database, machine learning, and interactive visualization systems should not be designed in isolation. For example, machine learning techniques might recommend improved data transformation and visual encoding decisions. Or, database query optimizers might take advantage of perceptual constraints, while prefetching methods reduce latency by modeling likely interactions. This workshop seeks to increase cross-pollination between these fields.

VisGuides: 2nd Workshop on the Creation, Curation, Critique and Conditioning of Principles and Guidelines in Visualization

Monday, Oct 22: 9:00am-6:00pm

Alexandra Diehl, University of Konstanz
Benjamin Bach, University of Edinburgh
Alfie Abdul-Rahman, King’s College London

Contact: diehl@dbvis.inf.uni-konstanz.de

The ever-increasing global awareness, practice, and teaching of information and data visualization include a growing audience of consumers and creators. We, as a scientific community must put careful emphasis on the collection and curation of knowledge in the area. The goal of this workshop is to discuss and consolidate guidelines, best practices, controversies, and success stories in the field of information visualization. Please also visit our discussion forum: http://visguides.org/.

VISREG - Visual Summarization and Report Generation: Beyond Scatter-Plots and Bar-Charts

Monday, Oct 22: 9:00am-12:40pm

Johanna Schmidt, Austrian Institute of Technology
Gabriel Mistelbauer, Otto-von-Guericke University

Contact: johanna.schmidt@ait.ac.at

This workshop looks at techniques and applications for the visual summarization of data, and for creating meaningful representations that could potentially be used in static reports. Visual summaries need to be able to combine a lot of different data aspects into one concise overview. They may also be employed as a separate visualization technique to communicate findings to external people. The workshop program consists of paper talks introducing new techniques for summarization in different domains. Based on these talks, common strategies will be identified. Together with the workshop participants we will identify open research questions and potential future research directions.

Machine Learning from User Interaction for Visualization and Analytics

Monday, Oct 22: 9:00am-12:40pm

John Wenskovitch, Virginia Tech
Michelle Dowling, Virginia Tech
Chris North, Virginia Tech
Remco Chang, Tufts University
Alex Endert, Georgia Tech
David Rogers, Los Alamos National Lab

Contact: jw87@vt.edu

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from across the VIS community to share their knowledge and build collaborations at the intersection of the Machine Learning and Visualization fields, with a focus on learning from user interaction. Our intention in this workshop is to pull expertise from across all fields of VIS in order to generate open discussion about how we currently learn from user interaction and where we can go with future research in this area. Further, we hope to collaboratively create a research agenda that explores the future of machine learning with user interaction based on the discussion during the workshop.

CityVis – Urban Data Visualization

Monday, Oct 22: 2:20pm-6:00pm

Sebastian Meier, Technologiestiftung
Nina Hälker, HafenCity University
Sarah Goodwin, RMIT University / Monash University

Contact: meier@technologiestiftung-berlin.de

Visualization as a tool for analysis, exploration and communication has become a driving force in the task of unravelling the complex urban fabrics that form our cities. Yet, there is a crucial need to bridge the gap between the flood of urban data and the capacity of decision makers to integrate that data into effective and informed decisions. The CityVis workshop wants to critically assess this notion and ask how data and visualization can be used to serve and better understand or organize urban processes, focusing on an explicitly “human-centric” perspective (i.e. decision support systems, co-creation or evaluation methods).

Video Presentation

Workshop on Visualization for AI Explainability (VISxAI)

Monday, Oct 22: 2:20pm-6:00pm

Mennatallah El-Assady, University of Konstanz / University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Duen Horng Chau, Georgia Tech
Adam Perer, IBM Research / Carnegie Mellon University
Hendrik Strobelt, IBM Research / MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Fernanda Viegas, Google Brain

Contact: orga.visxai@gmail.com

The goal of this workshop is to initiate a call for “explainables” that explain how AI techniques work using visualizations. We believe the VIS community can leverage their expertise in creating visual narratives to bring new insight into the often obfuscated complexity of AI systems.