Workshops

Accepted Workshops

Here is the list of the accepted workshops. Please visit their individual websites for details on the topics and submission deadlines, or contact the organizers directly if no website is available yet.

Fail Fest: A Workshop Celebrating the Scientific Value of Failure

When: Sunday Oct 25, 11:50am-3:15pm (Mountain Time - USA)

Jane L. Adams, University of Vermont
R. Jordan Crouser, Smith College
Lonni Besançon, Linköpings universitet
Paul Rosen, University of South Florida

Contact: janelydiaadams@gmail.com

Failure is a crucial part of the scientific process, but it is rarely given the same respect as success. FailFest, a half day workshop at IEEE VIS 2020, is a chance for the visualization community to share personal research failures and celebrate the important knowledge gained through these experiences. The workshop will cumulate strategies for building a VIS community that acknowledges failure and embraces its scientific value.

Machine Learning from User Interaction for Visualization and Analytics

When: Sunday Oct 25, 8:00am-11:25am (Mountain Time - USA)

John Wenskovitch, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Michelle Dowling, Virginia Polytechnic Institution and State University
Eli T Brown, DePaul University
Kristin Cook, PNNL Ab Mosca, Tufts University
Conny Walchshofer, Johannes Kepler University Linz
Marc Streit, Johannes Kepler University Linz
Kai Xu, Middlesex University

Contact: johnwenskovitch@gmail.com

The high-level 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 hope 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.

To achieve this goal, we propose a workshop that incorporates paper presentations, keynotes, and free-form discussion. Our goal is to allow for the presentation of cutting-edge research, while also providing participants and speakers with time to exchange ideas and to discuss new research directions.

Information Visualization of Geospatial Networks, Flows and Movement

When: Monday Oct 26, 11:50am-3:15pm (Mountain Time - USA)

Clio Andris, Georgia Tech
Somayeh Dodge, University of California at Santa Barbara
Alan MacEachren, Pennsylvania State University

Contact: clio@gatech.edu, sdodge@ucsb.edu, maceachren@psu.edu

This workshop will bring Geographic Information Scientists to the VIS community and stimulate new insights by providing a forum that connects diverse methods and ideas. The goal of this workshop is to interactively share advances in the visualization of network, flow and movement data for knowledge discovery, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and decision-making.

TREX: Workshop on TRust and EXpertise in Visual Analytics

When: Sunday Oct 25, 11:50am-3:15pm (Mountain Time - USA)

Eric Ragan, University of Florida
Mahsan Nourani, University of Florida
Emily Wall, Georgia Tech, Atlanta
John Goodall, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Aritra Dasgupta, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
Kristin Cook, PNNL

Contact: mahsannourani@ufl.edu, eragan@ufl.edu

Visual analytics (VA) systems combine computational support and human cognitive and perceptual skills to explore and analyze data. Many of these systems have been incorporating machine learning (ML) models and algorithms to introduce some level of automation to the analytical process. However, within this relationship, there are a number of aspects that can impact the effectiveness of the human-machine teaming, including: 1) People’s domain and system expertise; 2) Human biases, including cognitive and perceptual biases; 3) Trust in ML models and visual representation of data.

Expertise, bias, and trust are intrinsically intertwined. Additionally, visual analytics systems are used in different fields and by people from various backgrounds, with different levels of domain expertise and experience with machine learning and visual analytics tools. This variety of experience and domain expertise among human users has opened the door for new research directions and challenges in the fields of visual analytics and machine learning. Designers who fail to consider the aforementioned diversities might introduce problems to the analysis effectiveness and user experience. Furthermore, experience and domain expertise might affect user trust in visual analytics tools; although, how and why they affect trust is still an open question. Trust will eventually affect how much the users would rely on and use the tool. While users will take advantage of their prior experiences to make better decisions with the assistance of analytic support, they might carry many cognitive biases that can negatively influence their decision-making or analysis process. Recent research shows trust in and reliance on the visual analytics systems/tools as well as user strategies and biases can be directly influenced by domain and system expertise (or lack of expertise). The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to discuss and discover challenges in ML supported visual analytics tools and set the stage for future research directions and collaborations regarding these issues by proposing design guidelines, empirical findings, and VA techniques.

Visualization in Astrophysics: Developing New Methods, Discovering Our Universe, Educating the Earth

When: Monday Oct 26, 11:50am-3:15pm (Mountain Time - USA)

Bei Wang, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
Juna Kollmeier, Carnegie Observatories
Lauren Anderson, Carnegie Observatories

Contact: beiwang@sci.utah.edu

We propose a workshop during VIS 2020 titled “Visualization in Astrophysics: Developing New Methods, Discovering Our Universe, Educating the Earth”. The workshop aims to bring together researchers in astronomy and visualization in addressing emerging directions in visualization for large and complex astronomical datasets. It will facilitate close interactions among the attendees with the aim of accelerating the convergence between astronomy and visualization research, specifically in the development of practical visualization techniques and tools for large astronomical data. The workshop aims to have research talks in astronomy and visualization, including talks with planetaria content. It also aims to have moderated discussions and hands-on sessions to discuss potential solutions to mini-challenges involving well-curated astronomy data.

Workshop on Data Vis Activities to Facilitate Learning, Reflecting, Discussing, and Designing

When: Monday Oct 26, 8:00am-11:25am (Mountain Time - USA)

Samuel Huron, Telecom Paris Tech
Benjamin Bach, University of Edinburgh
Uta Hinrichs, University of St Andrews
Jonathan C. Roberts, Bangor University
Mandy Keck, Technische Universität Dresden

Contact: bbach@inf.ed.ac.uk

This workshop focuses on data-visualization activities, especially methods and challenges for teaching and engaging with data visualization concepts, knowledge, and practices. For example, sketching aids designers to consider alternative ideas; manipulating tokens help students conceptualize quantities for data visualization; user interviews and discussions help developers understand requirements. Workshops, classes, or collaborations with domain experts, often include hands-on data visualization activities that involve analog or digital tools and materials and more or less well defined protocols. Recent years have seen the emergence of such data visualization activities in different contexts, including education, visualization design, activism, self-reflection, and interdisciplinary collaboration. However, the broad range of contexts and target audiences that Data-Vis activities have been applied to makes it difficult to collect and identify commonalities and build knowledge in a systematic way. Thus, the goals of this workshop are i) start building an understanding and to synthesize protocols and materials used to lead data vis activities, ii) to bring together researchers, practitioners, and educators from within and outside of the visualization community, iii) brainstorm, design, experience, and try novel activities, and to iv) discuss issues around goals, methods, audiences, materials, and evaluation for teaching data visualization.

VisComm: Workshop on Visualization for Communication

When: Sunday Oct 25, 11:50am-3:15pm (Mountain Time - USA)

Adriana Arcia, Columbia University
Alvitta Ottley, Washington University
Robert Kosara, Tableau Research
Benjamin Watson, North Carolina State University

Contact: bwatson@ncsu.edu

Our proposed half-day workshop will bring together communicative visualization practitioners with researchers from several fields to address the questions raised by the rapidly growing communicative uses of visualization (e.g. in-news graphics, information graphics). These questions span issues of audience, application, evaluation, understanding and practice. To encourage participation from communities that do not typically attend IEEE Visualization and write academic papers, we will not only accept short papers but also visual case studies, and recruit program committee members from those communities. We have organized this workshop before with great success: at VIS 2018 with around 70 participants and nine papers and posters, and at VIS 2019 with around 60 participants (the room was over capacity, with people turned away) and 13 papers and posters.

Vis Futures: Design Fiction Methods for Envisioning Tomorrow’s Visualizations

When: Monday Oct 26, 11:50am-3:15pm (Mountain Time - USA)

Charles Perin, University of Victoria
Wesley Willett, University of Calgary
Katherine Currier, University of Calgary
Lora Oehlberg, University of Calgary
Sheelagh Carpendale, Simon Fraser University

Contact: cperin@uvic.ca

The goal of this workshop is to initiate the creation of one or several cards decks through a series of hands-on activities, that will serve as a tool for generating visualization design fictions. Although methods exist to ideate visualization designs, they are not tailored to design fictions. And although some methods exist for generating design fictions, they are not tailored to visualization. We believe that creating a design fiction method for envisioning tomorrow’s visualizations is essential for the research community to think about speculative design. There is also considerable pedagogical value in such a cards game, and these could result in a fun and creative in-class activity for teaching visualization design.

VisGuides: 3rd Workshop on the Creation, Curation, Critique and Conditioning of Principles and Guidelines in Visualization

When: Sunday Oct 25, 8:00am-11:25am (Mountain Time - USA)

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

Contact: alfie.abdulrahman@kcl.ac.uk

Our VisGuides 2020 Workshop proposal focuses on the analysis, design, reflection, and discussion of applicable frameworks to mastering guidelines in visualization by the broader visualization community, embedded in a larger research agenda of visualization theory and practices.

This workshop follows-up the ideas from the IEEE VIS 2016 and 2018 Workshop on Creation, Curation, Critique and Conditioning of Principles and Guidelines in Visualization (C4PGV) (http://c4pgv.swansea.ac.uk, https://c4pgv.dbvis.de/).

The workshop wants to deliver concrete ideas and meta-guidelines about how the visualization community can contribute to the collection, storage, formulation, and dissemination of guidelines - within and beyond the visualization community. To make this possible, we aim at:

  • Discussing work-in-progress and current activities around visualization guidelines.
  • Collect a comprehensive list of common and less common guidelines.
  • Based on this collection, exercise, create, and discuss a possible framework, or template, or methodology to capture guidelines.
  • Discuss a research agenda on how to address open questions around guidelines and how on-going research - in any field of visualization - can contribute to sustainable management and discussion of guidelines.

IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization Psychology

When: Monday Oct 26, 8:00am-11:25am (Mountain Time - USA)

Danielle Albers Szafir, University of Colorado Boulder
Rita Borgo, Kings College London
Darren J. Edwards, Swansea University
Lace Padilla, UC Merced
Brian David Fisher, Simon Fraser University
Min Chen, University of Oxford

Contact: d.j.edwards@swansea.ac.uk, min.chen@oerc.ox.ac.uk

Before 2010, each VIS conference typically featured 0-2 papers on empirical studies. The VisWeek 2010 in Salt Lake City became a turning point, and since then more and more empirical study papers have been presented at VIS. Between 2016 and 2019, there were some 60 empirical study papers in VIS/TVCG tracks. Many young talents who are knowledgeable in both VIS and psychology emerged in the VIS community, while many colleagues in psychology are authoring and co-authoring such papers and attending VIS conferences. It is therefore timely to ask: Is there a need for “Visualization Psychology” as a new interdisciplinary subject? Led by young researchers in both VIS and psychology, this proposed workshop will complement BELIV and VISxVISION by (i) identifying a broad range of visualization phenomena that cannot be adequately explained by existing theories and experiments in VIS and psychology; (ii) Exploring the research questions beyond the scope of visual perception and reaching out to more research findings in psychology in many areas of cognition; and (iii) Enabling visualization and visual analytics to become a rich playground for making fundamental discoveries in psychology and cognitive science in general.