The Thrill of Discovering (Live from Ben Shneiderman’s talk)

Ben Shneiderman is visiting UIUC today. I am sitting at his talk “The Thrill of Discovery” at room 1040 NCSA. If you miss this one he will be at 126 GSLIS this afternoon at 3pm  given another talk Accelerating Discovery and Innovation: Designing Creativity Support Tools". His opening today:

This talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, Ebay auction, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher).

After a set of demos he also introduced, the Many Eyes project for visualization sharing and exploration. And following it, some Tree Map Viz for the stock market to plot the current situation of the stock market. The same tree map viz is also used to visualize some data provided by the music billboard. All assuming you have 2 attributes (color and size), then the tree map can render nicely (for instance color = topic and size = number of news released on the topic).

Some more examples of the visualization of time series. The interesting point is to help navigation, but also, how can relevant patterns can be identified. More interestingly, the challenges to have fast visual queries requires fast sweeping stores to be able to get the stored information. Moreover, identifying features can be done automatically, but assessing which of those are intereresting is left to human interpretation.

Some forms of analysis can greatly benefit from a proper visualization of the results. For instance, color coloring low dimension projections of high dimensional data helps to reveal patterns easy identifiable by the human eye. The bottom line, such visualizations blend analysis and users together to boost the ability to identify relevant/interesting.

And to close, how can you validate such elements. Ben’s group took the compelling road. Put people to use it. When they get relevant discoveries, try to publish it on a top conference/journal (or some sort of similar social screening).

To wrap up, a great speaker and a very compelling case for the need/benefits for information visualization techniques. Unfortunately, I cannot attend his afternoon class since it overlaps with the course I am teaching (GE 498).