Seminar - Prof Sheelagh Carpendale

Interactive Information Visualization

Monday 13th May

16:00 - 17:30

A130 (College Building)

Information visualization is being increasingly recognized as having a crucial role to play in our burgeoning data society. Yet, finding the right visualization for a specific data set, a given data task, or an evidence-based decision support tool can still be elusive. Prof. Sheelagh Carpendale will discuss her continued research towards promoting data comprehension by creating appropriate interactive visual tools that can help people negotiate the everyday transformation of vast amounts of information into knowledge. Specifically, Sheelagh will talk about her research into extending the available visual representations, using interaction to expand the potential of existing visualizations, and into broadening the potential of information visualization by investigating engagement with new audiences.  While data has the potential to enrich people’s lives, there are still many challenges in how to make it comprehensible, accessible and transparent. Sheelagh continues to explore how to best use interactive visualizations to develop tools that fit and support people’s everyday work and social practices in her broad portfolio of research.

BIO: Sheelagh Carpendale is a Full Professor at Simon Fraser University in the School of Computing Science. She holds an NSERC/AITF/SMART Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies and has held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Information Visualization. Her most recent awards include the IEEE Visualization Career Award and being inducted into the ACM CHI Academy. She has also received many other awards including the NSERC E.W.R. STEACIE Fellowship, a BAFTA in Interactive Learning; the Alberta ASTech Award, the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award, and was featured in Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council - State of the Nation 2012 - report. Dr. Carpendale directs the Innovations in Visualization (InnoVis) research group and initiated the interdisciplinary graduate program, Computational Media Design. She is an internationally renowned leader in both information visualization and large display interaction. Her research focuses on information visualization, interaction design, and qualitative empirical research. By studying how people interact with information both in work and social settings, she works towards designing more natural, accessible and understandable interactive visual representations of data. She combines information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction with innovative new interaction techniques to better support the everyday practices of people who are viewing, representing, and interacting with information.

City Data Science Institute launched

The giCentre is a member of the newly-launched City Data Science Institute, an initiative that brings together data intensive, AI and data visualisation expertise and data-driven research in a variety of disciplines such as healthcare, finance, energy, transport and the creative industries. This interdisciplinary hub is aimed at fostering collaborations by connecting experts across the University and in the wider community, including industry partners and other universities.

More information about other members and the full range of disciplines involved is available in the Institute’s website.

Panos Giannopoulos joins giCentre

Welcome to Panos Giannopoulos, who has joined the giCentre as a Lecturer in Algorithms/Computational Geometry. His research interests include geometric optimisation, approximation algorithms and fixed-parameter (in)tractability. He was previously at Middlesex University and holds a Habilitation from Free University of Berlin (Germany), PhD in Computer Science (Utrecht University) and MSc in Computer Science (Imperial College London).

Fully-funded PhD studentships at giCentre

The School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering is offering a limited number of fully-funded PhD studentships.

These provide an excellent opportunity to study for a PhD at the giCentre. We are currently looking for candidates who are interested in topics across data visualisation and data science. We have a particular interest in visual data science that use visual approaches to doing data science. See our best papers and have a look at some of the PhD topics that we’d like to supervise… or propose your own. If you are interested, please email us on gicentre@city.ac.uk, either indicating which proposal interests you or giving us your own specific ideas.

giCentre is a Research Centre of about 15 academics, researchers and PhD students who are working at the forefront of information visualisation and visual data science. We contribute to the Department's hugely successful MSc in Data Science programme and have close working relationships with the other Research Centres in the department. We have a good working space and environment and welcome new researchers joining or otherwise interacting with our group.

These studentships will be competitive. You'll need a good degree in a related area (computer science or other quantitative subject). Your application will benefit from early interaction with us, so please do get in touch with as soon as you can, well before the studentship deadline of 7th March.

These studentship give recipients a tax-free stipend per year (currently £16,000) for three years and will pay UK/EU tuition fees. Successful candidates will also be able to be involved in teaching support. Full details are on the university website. Note that the 14 listed there are for across the whole university; we would only expect three to be available for our department.

VIS Best Poster Award - hat-trick for giCentre

The giCentre strikes again this year, after winning the VAST Best Poster in 2016, and the InfoVis Best Poster in 2017. We are delighted to announce that our poster Conveying uncertainty in archived war diaries with GeoBlobs has been awarded the IEEE InfoVis Best Poster 2018.
 
In collaboration with The National Archives we explored options to visualize uncertainty in troop movement data derived from handwritten first word war UK military diaries.

Come and see us in Berlin during the poster session on Wednesday evening. Meanwhile have a look at the poster abstract and a draft of the design. An interactive prototype will be on display during the opening event of the VIS Arts Program on Tuesday evening.

We, Eirini Goudarouli, Steven Hirschorn (both with The National Archives), Johannes Liem, Jo Wood (both with the giCentre) and Charles Perin (with the giCentre and the University of Victoria) would like to thank the reviewers and InfoVis poster chairs.

Hon Mention for Literate Visualization at IEEE InfoVis

Our paper on Literate Visualization was awarded an Honorable Mention at IEEE VIS.

We'll be presenting the work at InfoVis in Berlin.

The paper is featured here : Design Exposition with Literate Visualization

There are movies and examples that let you use, develop and try literate visualization at our GitHub repo: LitVis Repository

OpenVis Conf: Telling Visualization Design Stories

Jo Wood's OpenVisConf talk is now available on YouTube - along with many other useful talks from the conference held in Paris this summer.

In Why Not How! Telling Visualization Design Stories Jo justifies and introduces an approach to Literate Visualization developed at the giCentre.