The IEEE VisWeek Conference 2011 is taking place in Providence, RI this week (23rd to 28th). VisWeek 2011 is the premier forum for visualization advances for academia, government, and industry, bringing together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in tools, techniques, technology and theory.

The week is organized around three separate conferences IEEE Visualization 2011, the venue for all visualization research for data that has an intrinsic spatial component, IEEE Information Visualization 2011 focused on research relating to visual mappings of non-spatial data and interaction techniques and IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology 2011 which concerns the reasoning processes involved in visual analysis and the application of visual environments to generate useful insight about real-world problems.
I’m disappointed to not be able to attend the event this week but am delighted that Jérôme Cukier has very kindly agreed to provide updates of his discoveries, reactions and experiences. I’m particularly pleased to provide a platform for Jérôme’s updates because I consider him to be one of the most astute and thoughtful observers within the visualisation field.
 

Day Three – Tuesday 25th October

VisWeek, take 2.
Why wasn’t there a VisWeek Day 2 post? Yesterday’s sessions were more technical and specialized than the workshop I attended the first day, so it’s difficult to summarize them honestly in a few sentences. I really enjoyed Daniel Keim’s overview of text analytics though. Daniel explained the main difficulties of text visualizations: that text is somewhat loosely structured, that text analytics is imprecise at best – if humans fail to understand irony, how can we get computers to succeed? – and that on top of that it’s difficult to visualize alphanumeric data. Though, he showed us compelling examples of what can be done in the areas of literature, opinion, readability, documents or news streams analysis.
The other reason why I didn’t write anything on Monday is because I couldn’t get network all day, which is a very sobering experience. Last week, when my twitter timeline was full of #tcc11 mentions, I wrote that I was hoping to see as many #visweek hashtags this week, but it’s pretty difficult to do anything internet-related without the internet.
This brings us to today, Tuesday, and the visweek keynote by Paul Thagard. Of all the VisWeek keynotes I’ve seen so far this was the one which I felt was the least related to visualization. I found it an interesting talk yet a strange choice for the keynote. The subject was visual thinking in discovery and invention, and the main idea was that creativity happens when the innovator is able to combine several existing concepts and get a new notion out of that. The speaker looked at a list of the 100 greatest technological inventions and the 100 greatest scientific discoveries and reports that in all 200 cases, this is what happened. For instance, Copernicus by combining the existing concepts of sun, earth and revolving came up with the proposition that the earth revolves around the sun. Or Edison, by considering the existing deas of bulb, carbon and filament came up with the light bulb. Paul showed a neural simulation that showed how this combination happens in the brain, that is how perceiving two different stimuli is different as perceiving the sum of those 2 stimuli. In the last part of his talk he elaborated on how cognitive science can help social sciences, notably with a tool called Empathica but I find it difficult to report that concisely so I invite you to check the tool out.
In the afternoon I liked the session about tree, network and social network analysis. 2 cool systems were presented to represent “regular” tabular data (i.e. rows and columns) in a network form (nodes and edges): ploceus and orion, which worked wonderfully well on the examples that were presented.
The last paper of that session was the one that impressed me most for that day, it was about creating (and exploring) a social network in the enterprise, based on the explicit or implicit relations that exist there. Explicit meaning: I say that this person is my friend, whereas implicit could be, the two of us sit nearby, I commented her blog post etc. Adam Perer, the speaker, is from IBM so their data was the 450k IBM employees and the 73m relations they found among them. Once the system is built they are able to query it, for instance to return the people most skilled on a topic, or to better know someone.
I ended the day at the Bird-of-a-Feather meeting on blogging. For those of us who didn’t know what that was, let’s just say it’s a fancy name for meeting on a specific topic. It was organized by Robert “@eagereyes” Kosara and Enrico “@filwd” Bertini and a dozen people participated, and we had a good, interesting discussion on at least 3 topics.
First, on having opinions and standing by them. The overall consensus was that it’s a good thing as bloggers to speak your mind even if you disagree with many. Robert for instance did criticize harshly a number of visualizations. Some of us thought there was a limit on what you could say, and of course the David McCandless issue was brought up. To be fair, most people around the table thought the huge amount of negative reviews he’s got for his work was more than justified, although I personally strongly disagree with that. I’m sorry to report that we ended up spending a lot of time discussing it. Then came the question, why target a wide audience vs the vis community? Does it even make sense? We agreed though that on visualization blogs there could be helpful insight that can be picked up through a google search long, long after the publication date. This is helpful, as few people know proper visualization techniques outside the visualization community. One other point on which there was a fair consensus is that while it’s unrealistic to attempt to compete with flowingdata.com or infosthetics.com, it is valuable to keep blogging, be it to write reviews and opinions, tutorials, launch discussions or just cover a specific field. Biological visualizations, for instance, seem pretty much unblogged at the moment…
And that concludes today’s report. Tomorrow will be the first day of infoVis, which I am very much looking forward to!
See you tomorrow!