We are pleased that Sebastian Meier - a PhD student from University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, working on mobile GeoVis and InfoVis projects - is visiting us until September. He'll doing some work with us, bringing his perspective to what we do. See his website for more information about him.
Marc Streit visiting giCentre
Marc Streit will be visiting the giCentre next week. He is assistant professor at the Institute of Computer Graphics at Johannes Kepler University, Linz. Working in information visualization and visual analytics, he has a special interest biological data visualization. The Caleydo project, of which he is co-founder, has attracted much attention and awards at several prestigious conferences. This is a great opportunity to hear from a rising star of Visualization -- Marc will be giving a talk next Wednesday 13th May, details of which are here.
City Unrulyversity Visualization
Jason Dykes, Jo Wood and Cagatay Turkay are participating in the Spring Term of City's 'pop-up' University.
City Unrulyversity consists of workshops run by academics from City, intended to "inform, inspire, and empower the next generation of Tech City entrepreneurs".
Sessions are on Wednesday evenings at Unruly Media just off Brick Lane and bookable through EventBrite.
Jo is "Telling Stories with Data Visualization", Jason is exploring ways of "Using UX and Visualization to Give You an Edge?" with UX consultant Paula de Matos and Cagatay is identifying the "Origins, Methods, Challenges and Future of Data Science".
You can get reports of the sessions and see pictures through the @CityUnruly twitter feed.
Visualization Analysis & Design
Professor Tamara Munzner of the University of British Columbia visited the giCentre in early February.
Tamara gave a giCentre research seminar outlining the approaches to visualization presented in her new book Visualization Analysis & Design.
The book provides a comprehensive and systematic answer to the question - how do we design systems that use visual representations of data to help people carry out data dependent tasks more effectively?
The seminar did so too - introducing Tamara's framework for analyzing the design of visualization systems to ensure that designs are effective for particular tasks and data sets across a variety of application areas.
Research Excellence
The 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) data have been released. The exercise, carried out every 6 years by the UK higher education funding bodies,, is used to assess the quality of research in UK academic institutions. Research was divided into 36 thematic areas and rated on a 5 point scale in a categories including academic output, wider impact and research environment.
The giCentre has provided an interactive visualization of the results that allow the 50,000 items of data and various ranking metrics to be explored.
Puzzling Seminar
Prof. Marc van Kreveld visited in November to give a research seminar in the Department of Computer Science.
Mark's talk "Puzzles in Wood, Puzzles on Paper, and Puzzles in Bytes" focused on puzzles, their design and difficulty.
The talk included plenty of examples, with puzzles that use wood, metal and paper, some of which Marc had designed and made.
The talk was relevant to a variety of work undertaken in the School of Mathematics,Computer Science and Engineering including our research involving games, physical objects, creativity and mathematics.
giCentre at IEEE Vis 2014
This year IEEE VIS was held in Europe (Paris) for the first time. giCentre researchers made contributions throughout the week.
VIS kicked off with a series workshops. Rafael Henkin presented an entry to the VAST Challenge that was given an Honourable Mention and Natalie and Gennady Andrienko presented an award winning entry using their Semantic Spaces methodology. Roger Beecham delivered a paper on Map Line-ups at the DECISIVe workshop, Cagatay Turkay presented at a workshop on Visualization for Predictive Analytics and Jason Dykes co-lead a workshop on the Future of Vis.
During the conference itself, giCentre researchers were involved in four paper presentations: Attribute Signatures, an approach to analysing multivariate data; Stenomaps, a new technique for simplified representations of spatial data; Perceptually Uniform Motion Space, a study of factors that affect motion perception; and a Multi-channel Approach to Data Visualization, which reflects on four years of collaborative design and analysis with colleagues at TfL. In addition, Sarah Goodwin presented a well-received poster on Multivariate Correlation and having been papers chair in 2012 and 2013, Jason chaired this year's IEEE Information Visualization conference.
As well as enjoying some Parisian gastronomy, the conference culminated with a bike ride around Paris and its hinterlands.