Modeling complex systems is a time-consuming, difficult and fragmented task, often requiring the analyst to work with disparate data, a variety of models, and expert knowledge across a diverse set of domains. Applying a user-centered design process, we developed a mixed-initiative visual analytics approach, a subset of the Causemos platform, that allows analysts to rapidly assemble qualitative causal models of complex socio-natural systems. Our approach facilitates the construction, exploration, and curation of qualitative models bringing together data across disparate domains. Referencing a recent user evaluation, we demonstrate our approach's ability to interactively enrich user mental models and accelerate qualitative model building.

This paper describes an ongoing multi-scale visual analytics approach for exploring and analyzing biomedical knowledge at scale. We utilize global and local views, hierarchical and flow-based graph layouts, multi-faceted search, neighborhood recommendations, and document visualizations to help researchers interactively explore, query, and analyze biological graphs against the backdrop of biomedical knowledge. The generality of our approach insofar as it requires only knowledge graphs linked to documents means it can support a range of therapeutic use cases across different domains, from disease propagation to drug discovery. Early interactions with domain experts support our approach for use cases with graphs with over 40,000 nodes and 350,000 edges.

Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar market, and therefore a target for abuse by Internet criminals. Prior work has shown millions of dollars of advertisers’ capital are lost due to ad abuse and focused on defense from the perspective of the end-host or the local network egress point. We investigate the potential of using public threat data to measure and detect adware and malicious affiliate traffic from the perspective of demand side platforms, which facilitate ad bidding between ad exchanges and advertisers. Our results show that malicious ad campaigns have statistically significant differences in traffic and lookup patterns from benign ones, however, public blacklists can only label a small percentage of ad publishers (0.27%), which suggests new lists dedicated to ad abuse should be created. Furthermore, we show malicious infrastructure on ad exchanges can be tracked with simple graph analysis and maliciousness heuristics.

As threat detection systems become critical for protecting modern organizations, visualization has emerged as an essential tool for security analysts to understand network threats. However, there is currently little research in designing and evaluating effective network threat analysis visualizations. To address this problem, we take a user-centered approach, starting with designing an open source threat analysis console for DNS-based network threat analysis grounded in both an understanding of analysts' needs and tasks and security visualization best practices. The proposed open source threat analysis console, called THACO (THreat Analysis COnsole), leverages open DNS datasets, domain WHOIS records, and both public malware and domain blacklists. It also uses a visually scalable visualization technique, a multi-grouping, zoomable treemap, to adapt to DNS-based network threat analysis needs. Then, we conduct a user study with 7 in-situ and 31 online IT security practitioners. Our code for THACO and THACO itself will be opened to the community in order to further improve the ability of analysts to perform network threat analysis and better secure their networks.

With the growing emphasis on visualization as a mechanism for analyzing and exploring large and complex data sets, visualization research has recognized the need of reusing prior design knowledge instead of starting from scratch. This fact is especially relevant in designing control systems in which alarm visualizations are key artifacts for human operators to maintain an awareness of the state of the process under control. In this context, there is a plethora of design material in the form of design rules that collect design knowledge about known ways to design alarm visualizations. However, these design rules can be too abstract, not comprehensive enough, and loosely coupled, being difficult to be interpreted and applied by non-experienced designers. Aiming at overcoming this situation, this paper proposes a design pattern language as a fitting approach to disseminate reusable alarm visualization design knowledge. The final aim is to provide designers with an easy access to the existing body of knowledge of recognized alarm visualization design solutions for operating control systems.

Electric power grid operation is a critical activity in which control room operators supervise the status of the grid infrastructure in order to avoid undesirable situations. One of the most important tasks of this operation is projecting ahead the infrastructure state in real time. This task is currently based on managing alarms, with the responsibility of the control room operator to estimate both their relevance and evolution in time. A review of traditional alarm visualization formats highlights some deficiencies, which may lead to operating inefficiencies or even critical operating problems. Driven by a field study, this paper presents Alarm Trend Catcher, an innovative alarm visualization approach aimed at assisting not only the perception of upcoming alarms but also the projection of future states of the electric power grid. The user study of this visualization approach shows supporting evidence of its benefits for gaining interesting operational insights from the alarm information.

Emergency planning is an ongoing activity in which a multidisciplinary group of experts intermittently collaborate to define the most appropriate response to risks. One of the most important tasks of emergency planning is the review of plans as a way of maintaining, refining, and improving them. This review of plans is based on exchanging knowledge and experiences in order to take into account different perspectives and generate alternative solutions. An exploratory case study carried out within municipal organizations has disclosed how the application of rigid plan reviewing practices hinders team creativity and, consequently, effective decision-making. This paper presents a computer-based collaborative environment aimed at supporting unstructured team discussion during the post-hoc review of emergency plan. This collaborative environment allows emergency planning team members to share their view in a free manner by interacting with user interface components distributed across several input and output dimensions. The usage of the environment has proved how the application of new interactive technologies can create more dynamic work settings, fostering team creativity.

The effectiveness of visualizations depends on their feasibility to support the goals and tasks of the user in some particular target domain. In order to fulfill this requirement, task analysis has been characterized as a needful activity during the visualization design cycle; however, there is a lack of artefacts that guides the processing of user tasks to design visualizations. This lack of guidelines may hide the identification of such tasks that should be supported by visualization. This fact is especially relevant in operational environments in which ineffective visualization designs may hinder the acquisition of Situation Awareness (SA) and, therefore, lead to the performance of erroneous operational decisions. With the purpose of overcoming this situation, this chapter presents a set of heuristics for addressing the application of Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) to identify visualization-supported tasks within this type of environments. The definition of such heuristics has relied on the review of the literature about SA-oriented design, visualization, and CTA, and the application of these concepts during the design of control system interfaces. The final aim is to provide a design framework that helps visualization designers to apply task analysis methods to the design of SA-oriented visualizations.

Information and communication technologies might help to emergency communities of volunteers to both empower community participation and improve their capacity to respond to unexpected events. However, designing technology to support these benefits places unique visualization challenges that go beyond the current state of research on public participation tools and related technologies. Empowering these communities requires developing representations that enable collaborative reflection, promote mutual visibility of volunteers’ efforts and sustain a shared view of the community. Similarly, it is necessary to create visualization methods that facilitate sense making of large, simultaneous and distributed pieces of heterogeneous information of different priority levels and with different levels of credibility. Accordingly, this paper analyzes these challenges and proposes a multi-view, multi-abstraction-level visualization approach to address them. In particular, it combines timeoriented visualizations, space-filling visualization techniques, interaction mechanisms and coordinated maps to support community participation as well as collaborative and individual sense making. The application of these visualization techniques is discussed through the development of a set of design prototypes. Citizen participation; communities of volunteers; emergency management; sense making; visualization techniques

Information and communication technologies might empower emergency communities of volunteers by assisting community participation and improving their capacity to respond to unexpected events. However, designing technology for such purpose places unique visualization challenges that go beyond the current state of research on public participation tools and related technologies. Empowering these communities requires developing representations that enable collaborative reflection, promote mutual visibility of volunteers’ efforts and sustain a shared view of the community. Similarly, it is necessary to envision visualizations that facilitate sense making of large, simultaneous and distributed pieces of heterogeneous information with different levels of credibility and priority. Accordingly, this paper identifies and characterizes these challenges to propose a multi-view and multi-abstraction-level visualization approach for emergency communities of volunteers. In particular, it combines time-oriented visualizations, space-filling visualization techniques, interaction mechanisms and coordinated maps to support community participation as well as collaborative and individual sense making. The application of these visualization techniques is discussed through the development of a set of design prototypes.

Due to their effective capability to fix the attention of control room operators to such conditions that require some kind of response, alarm visualizations have become key control artifacts in Human Supervisory Control environments. Nevertheless, the increasing complexity and interconnectivity of controlled processes highlights the necessity of new control artifacts that support both identification and diagnosis tasks. In this line of work, this paper posits the need of redesigning alarm visualizations in order to assist not only the real-time detection of failures but also the achievement of Situation Awareness by control room operators. Based on dynamic interaction and exploration capabilities, this new design perspective for alarm visualizations may improve the operator’s ability to diagnose the causes of abnormal situations.

The development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) is based on the selection, assembly, and tailoring of Rich-User-Interface (RUI) components. While the user interface design is usually guided by principles, guidelines, and heuristics, there are not mechanisms for systematically selecting RUI components. Moreover, there is a lack of homogeneous classification criteria that hinders the selection of components and increases the relevance of experience designing web applications. To ease the search and the choosing of components by web-developers, this paper presents a taxonomy for classifying RUI components. The development of such a taxonomy has been based on both the study of relevant resources from the UI domain and the opinions of experts.