IEEE VIS - Certificate of Appreciation

Jason Dykes has received a Certificate of Appreciation for Outstanding Service to the VIS conference from the IEEE Computer Society.

After 10 years service as Papers Chair for IEEE Information Visualization (2012-13), on the IEEE VIS Steering Committee (2014-19), and on the IEEE VIS Executive Committee (2017-21), Jason’s various terms finally ended at IEEE VIS 2021, New Orleans. 

It has been a busy decade for the conference - with open practice recommendations, diversity scholarships, elections, a code of conduct, short papers, live streaming, satellite events and an annual bike ride all being established.

A new governance model, the Test of Time awards, the integration of the three contributory conferences (InfoVis, VAST and SciVis) into a new set of data driven subject areas and the conference location venturing beyond North America and Europe are also initiatives to which Jason has contributed.

And the pandemic was quite a challenge too. But the conference ran virtually in 2020 and 2021 and this has opened up new ways of engaging in and contributing to VIS. Many of these will persist.

Next year, IEEE VIS will be held in Oklahoma City, OK as a hybrid conference. 

IEEE VIS - Words of Estimative Correlation

Rafael Henkin and Cagatay Turkay presented their paper on the terms used to describe correlation in scatter plots, and the scatter plots people select in association with particular terms. at IEEE VIS in New Orleans.

‘Words of Estimative Correlation: Studying Verbalizations of Scatterplots’ is a really nice extension of some of the ideas about the terms that people use to describe probabilities:

  • highly likely, probable, good chance, likely

The paper is published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics with a pre-print available on arXiv.

You can watch Rafael present the work at IEEE VIS on YouTube.

Alt.VIS - Illegible Semantics

Jason’s work with colleagues in Norway, Germany and the US was presented at the IEEE VIS fringe event alt.vis - “a forum for controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing research”.

The ‘Illegible Semantics’ paper looks at the relationships between the readability of text and its decoration with styling and flourishes that reduce readability but convey important information.

This exploration is focussed on the logos of heavy metal bands. It is driven computationally from a large database of logos and humanistically with reference to Gerrit Rijken, a logo designer whose practice is captured in the model that is produced.  

The paper attempts some humour, but is also serious about the need to take ‘alt’ perspectives and experiment with design practice and guidelines to inform innovative, useful and inspiring visualization.

It was delivered Gerrit - aka logo designer TundraToucan. The video presentation is online and was well received at the conference.

The MetalVis tool and associated materials are also online.