The results of machine learning models can often be difficult to interpret, especially for domain experts. Audio Explorer, the winning entry of the 2018 VAST Challenge, is an interactive data exploration tool that effectively communicates machine learning results using coordinated geospatial, temporal, and auditory visualizations to promote information discovery.

The 2018 VAST Challenge Mini-challenge 1 poses a multifaceted data analysis problem requiring specialized insight into several fields of computing and visual analytics. In this paper we present our tool, Audio Explorer, that combines deep learning classification of audio files with geospatial and auditory visualization techniques in a user-friendly interface designed to promote information discovery.

In this report, we organize and reflect on recent advances and challenges in the field of sports data visualization. The exponentially‐growing body of visualization research based on sports data is a prime indication of the importance and timeliness of this report. Sports data visualization research encompasses the breadth of visualization tasks and goals: exploring the design of new visualization techniques; adapting existing visualizations to a novel domain; and conducting design studies and evaluations in close collaboration with experts, including practitioners, enthusiasts, and journalists. Frequently this research has impact beyond sports in both academia and in industry because it is i) grounded in realistic, highly heterogeneous data, ii) applied to real‐world problems, and iii) designed in close collaboration with domain experts. In this report, we analyze current research contributions through the lens of three categories of sports data: box score data (data containing statistical summaries of a sport event such as a game), tracking data (data about in‐game actions and trajectories), and meta‐data (data about the sport and its participants but not necessarily a given game). We conclude this report with a high‐level discussion of sports visualization research informed by our analysis—identifying critical research gaps and valuable opportunities for the visualization community. More information is available at the STAR's website: https://sportsdataviz.github.io/ .

The techniques and systems described herein efficiently and effectively enable an author to create an interactive, data-driven presentation during an authoring stage. Moreover, the techniques and systems enable a consumer to interact with the data-driven presentation during a consuming stage. For example, the techniques and systems generate and output graphical user interfaces that enable an author to define consumer interaction settings so a consumer of the presentation can: switch between alternative types of visual elements (e.g., charts), determine whether a visual element is presented with or without animation, determine a presentation timing of visual elements and/or textual elements, determine presentation styles (e.g., color scheme, font type, etc.), filter a set of data presented in a visual element so that a subset of the data can be viewed or distinguished, and/or adjust a scale associated with a visual element (e.g., change a scale for an axis of a chart).

In this article, we present an interactive visual information retrieval and recommendation system, called VisIRR, for large-scale document discovery. VisIRR effectively combines the paradigms of (1) a passive pull through query processes for retrieval and (2) an active push that recommends items of potential interest to users based on their preferences. Equipped with an efficient dynamic query interface against a large-scale corpus, VisIRR organizes the retrieved documents into high-level topics and visualizes them in a 2D space, representing the relationships among the topics along with their keyword summary. In addition, based on interactive personalized preference feedback with regard to documents, VisIRR provides document recommendations from the entire corpus, which are beyond the retrieved sets. Such recommended documents are visualized in the same space as the retrieved documents, so that users can seamlessly analyze both existing and newly recommended ones. This article presents novel computational methods, which make these integrated representations and fast interactions possible for a large-scale document corpus. We illustrate how the system works by providing detailed usage scenarios. Additionally, we present preliminary user study results for evaluating the effectiveness of the system.

Storytelling with data is becoming an important component of many fields such as graphic design, the advocacy of causes, and journalism. New techniques for integrating data visualization into narrative stories have now become commonplace. Authors are enabling new reader experiences, such as linking textual narrative and data visualizations through dynamic queries embedded in the text. Novel means of communicating position and navigating within the narrative also have merged, such as utilizing scrolling to advance narration and initiate animations. We advance the study of narrative visualization through an analysis of a curated collection of recent data-driven stories shared on the web. Drawing from the results of this analysis, we present a set of techniques being employed in these examples, organized under four high-level categories that help authors to tell stories in creative ways: communicating narrative and explaining data, linking separated story elements, enhancing structure and navigation, and providing controlled exploration. We describe the benefits of each storytelling technique along with a number of example applications of the ideas through recent data-driven stories. Additionally, we discuss the trends we observed as well as how the field has evolved and grown. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of areas for future research.

We have created and made available to all a dataset with information about every paper that has appeared at the IEEE Visualization (VIS) set of conferences: InfoVis, SciVis, VAST, and Vis. The information about each paper includes its title, abstract, authors, and citations to other papers in the conference series, among many other attributes. This article describes the motivation for creating the dataset, as well as our process of coalescing and cleaning the data, and a set of three visualizations we created to facilitate exploration of the data. This data is meant to be useful to the broad data visualization community to help understand the evolution of the field and as an example document collection for text data visualization research.

We have developed an updated version of the Dust and Magnet visualization technique for large, multitouch displays. Multiple users can interactively manipulate magnets (data attributes) to observe how iron dust (the data items) changes its positions, and thus gain insight about the data. This type of visualization provides a very direct engagement with the data and thus a very ”hands on” analytic experience.

There is a wealth of visualization techniques available for graph and network visualization. However, each of these techniques was designed for a specific task. Many graph visualization techniques and the transitions between them can be specified using a set of operations on the visualization elements such as positioning or resizing nodes, showing or hiding edges, or showing or hiding axes. We term these operations Graph-Level Operations or GLOs. Our goal is to identify and provide a comprehensive set of these operations in order to better support the broadest range of graph and network analysis tasks. Here we present early results of our work, including a preliminary set of operations and an example application of GLOs in transitioning between familiar graph visualization techniques. \

We present VisIRR, an interactive visual information retrieval and recommendation system for large-scale document data. Starting with a query, VisIRR visualizes the retrieved documents in a scatter plot along with their topic summary. Next, based on interactive personalized preference feedback on the documents, VisIRR collects and visualizes potentially relevant documents out of the entire corpus so that an integrated analysis of both retrieved and recommended documents can be performed seamlessly.

The field of graph visualization has produced a wealth of visualization techniques for accomplishing a variety of analysis tasks. Therefore analysts often rely on a suite of different techniques, and visual graph analysis application builders strive to provide this breadth of techniques. To provide a holistic model for specifying network visualization techniques (as opposed to considering each technique in isolation) we present the Graph-Level Operations (GLO) model. We describe a method for identifying GLOs and apply it to identify five classes of GLOs, which can be flexibly combined to re-create six canonical graph visualization techniques. We discuss advantages of the GLO model, including potentially discovering new, effective network visualization techniques and easing the engineering challenges of building multi-technique graph visualization applications. Finally, we implement the GLOs that we identified into the GLO-STIX prototype system that enables an analyst to interactively explore a graph by applying GLOs.

As datasets grow and analytic algorithms become more complex, the typical workflow of analysts launching an analytic, waiting for it to complete, inspecting the results, and then re-Iaunching the computation with adjusted parameters is not realistic for many real-world tasks. This paper presents an alternative workflow, progressive visual analytics, which enables an analyst to inspect partial results of an algorithm as they become available and interact with the algorithm to prioritize subspaces of interest. Progressive visual analytics depends on adapting analytical algorithms to produce meaningful partial results and enable analyst intervention without sacrificing computational speed. The paradigm also depends on adapting information visualization techniques to incorporate the constantly refining results without overwhelming analysts and provide interactions to support an analyst directing the analytic. The contributions of this paper include: a description of the progressive visual analytics paradigm; design goals for both the algorithms and visualizations in progressive visual analytics systems; an example progressive visual analytics system (Progressive Insights) for analyzing common patterns in a collection of event sequences; and an evaluation of Progressive Insights and the progressive visual analytics paradigm by clinical researchers analyzing electronic medical records.

Research areas: Machine learning, Data mining, Information visualization, Visual analytics, Text visualization.

Citation counts and intra-conference citations are one useful measure of the impact of prior research in a field. We have developed CiteVis, a visualization system for portraying citation data about the IEEE InfoVis Conference and its papers. Rather than use a node-link network visualization, we employ an attribute-based layout along with interaction to foster exploration and knowledge discovery.