1,298 research outputs found
A parent-centered radial layout algorithm for interactive graph visualization and animation
We have developed (1) a graph visualization system that allows users to
explore graphs by viewing them as a succession of spanning trees selected
interactively, (2) a radial graph layout algorithm, and (3) an animation
algorithm that generates meaningful visualizations and smooth transitions
between graphs while minimizing edge crossings during transitions and in static
layouts.
Our system is similar to the radial layout system of Yee et al. (2001), but
differs primarily in that each node is positioned on a coordinate system
centered on its own parent rather than on a single coordinate system for all
nodes. Our system is thus easy to define recursively and lends itself to
parallelization. It also guarantees that layouts have many nice properties,
such as: it guarantees certain edges never cross during an animation.
We compared the layouts and transitions produced by our algorithms to those
produced by Yee et al. Results from several experiments indicate that our
system produces fewer edge crossings during transitions between graph drawings,
and that the transitions more often involve changes in local scaling rather
than structure.
These findings suggest the system has promise as an interactive graph
exploration tool in a variety of settings
Fast convergence layout algorithm for drawing graphs in marching-graph
Marching-Graph is a new visualization that integrates the graph metaphor and the spatial metaphor into a single visualization. It provides users with highly interactive maps for accessing the logical structures of information that has the geographical attributes. Instead of presenting known facts onto maps, it provides a mechanism for users to visually analyze and seek unknown knowledge through effective human-map interaction and navigation across different spaces. However, the traditional force-directed layout algorithms are very slow in reaching an equilibrium configuration of forces. They usually spend tens of seconds making the layout of a graph converge. Thus, those force-directed layout algorithms can not satisfy the requirement for drawing a sequence of graphs rapidly, while the users are quickly marching through the geographic regions. This paper proposes a fast convergence layout method that speeds up the interaction time while users are progressively exploring a sequence of graphs through a series of force-directed layouts in Marching-Graph. It essentially combines a radial tree drawing method and a force-directed graph drawing method to achieve the fast convergence of energy minimization
Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time
Assessing the influence of a scholar's work is an important task for funding
organizations, academic departments, and researchers. Common methods, such as
measures of citation counts, can ignore much of the nuance and
multidimensionality of scholarly influence. We present an approach for
generating dynamic visualizations of scholars' careers. This approach uses an
animated node-link diagram showing the citation network accumulated around the
researcher over the course of the career in concert with key indicators,
highlighting influence both within and across fields. We developed our design
in collaboration with one funding organization---the Pew Biomedical Scholars
program---but the methods are generalizable to visualizations of scholarly
influence. We applied the design method to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which
includes more than 120 million publications. We validate our abstractions
throughout the process through collaboration with the Pew Biomedical Scholars
program officers and summative evaluations with their scholars
Animating the evolution of software
The use and development of open source software has increased significantly in the last decade. The high frequency of changes and releases across a distributed environment requires good project management tools in order to control the process adequately. However, even with these tools in place, the nature of the development and the fact that developers will often work on many other projects simultaneously, means that the developers are unlikely to have a clear picture of the current state of the project at any time. Furthermore, the poor documentation associated with many projects has a detrimental effect when encouraging new developers to contribute to the software. A typical version control repository contains a mine of information that is not always obvious and not easy to comprehend in its raw form. However, presenting this historical data in a suitable format by using software visualisation techniques allows the evolution of the software over a number of releases to be shown. This allows the changes that have been made to the software to be identified clearly, thus ensuring that the effect of those changes will also be emphasised. This then enables both managers and developers to gain a more detailed view of the current state of the project. The visualisation of evolving software introduces a number of new issues. This thesis investigates some of these issues in detail, and recommends a number of solutions in order to alleviate the problems that may otherwise arise. The solutions are then demonstrated in the definition of two new visualisations. These use historical data contained within version control repositories to show the evolution of the software at a number of levels of granularity. Additionally, animation is used as an integral part of both visualisations - not only to show the evolution by representing the progression of time, but also to highlight the changes that have occurred. Previously, the use of animation within software visualisation has been primarily restricted to small-scale, hand generated visualisations. However, this thesis shows the viability of using animation within software visualisation with automated visualisations on a large scale. In addition, evaluation of the visualisations has shown that they are suitable for showing the changes that have occurred in the software over a period of time, and subsequently how the software has evolved. These visualisations are therefore suitable for use by developers and managers involved with open source software. In addition, they also provide a basis for future research in evolutionary visualisations, software evolution and open source development
Segue: Overviewing Evolution Patterns of Egocentric Networks by Interactive Construction of Spatial Layouts
Getting the overall picture of how a large number of ego-networks evolve is a
common yet challenging task. Existing techniques often require analysts to
inspect the evolution patterns of ego-networks one after another. In this
study, we explore an approach that allows analysts to interactively create
spatial layouts in which each dot is a dynamic ego-network. These spatial
layouts provide overviews of the evolution patterns of ego-networks, thereby
revealing different global patterns such as trends, clusters and outliers in
evolution patterns. To let analysts interactively construct interpretable
spatial layouts, we propose a data transformation pipeline, with which analysts
can adjust the spatial layouts and convert dynamic egonetworks into event
sequences to aid interpretations of the spatial positions. Based on this
transformation pipeline, we developed Segue, a visual analysis system that
supports thorough exploration of the evolution patterns of ego-networks.
Through two usage scenarios, we demonstrate how analysts can gain insights into
the overall evolution patterns of a large collection of ego-networks by
interactively creating different spatial layouts.Comment: Published at IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and
Technology (IEEE VAST 2018
Interactive, tree-based graph visualization
We introduce an interactive graph visualization scheme that allows users to explore graphs by viewing them as a sequence of spanning trees, rather than the entire graph all at once. The user determines which spanning trees are displayed by selecting a vertex from the graph to be the root. Our main contributions are a graph drawing algorithm that generates meaningful representations of graphs using extracted spanning trees, and a graph animation algorithm for creating smooth, continuous transitions between graph drawings. We conduct experiments to measure how well our algorithms visualize graphs and compare them to another visualization scheme
Visualization for Biological Models, Simulation, and Ontologies
In this dissertation, I present three browsers that I have developed for the purpose
of exploring, understanding, and analyzing models, simulations, and ontologies in
biology and medicine. The ļ¬rst browser visualizes multidimensional simulation data
as an animation. The second browser visualizes the equations of a complex model as
a network and puts structure and organization on top of equations and variables. The
third browser is an ontology viewer and editor, directly intended for the Foundational
Model of Anatomy (FMA), but applicable to other ontologies as well. This browser
has two contributions. First, it is a lightweight deliverable that lets someone easily
dabble with the FMA. Second, it lets the user edit an ontology to create a view of
it. For the ontology browser, I also conduct user studies to reļ¬ne and evaluate the
software
Visual Exploration System for Analyzing Trends in Annual Recruitment Using Time-varying Graphs
Annual recruitment data of new graduates are manually analyzed by human
resources specialists (HR) in industries, which signifies the need to evaluate
the recruitment strategy of HR specialists. Every year, different applicants
send in job applications to companies. The relationships between applicants'
attributes (e.g., English skill or academic credential) can be used to analyze
the changes in recruitment trends across multiple years' data. However, most
attributes are unnormalized and thus require thorough preprocessing. Such
unnormalized data hinder the effective comparison of the relationship between
applicants in the early stage of data analysis. Thus, a visual exploration
system is highly needed to gain insight from the overview of the relationship
between applicants across multiple years. In this study, we propose the
Polarizing Attributes for Network Analysis of Correlation on Entities
Association (Panacea) visualization system. The proposed system integrates a
time-varying graph model and dynamic graph visualization for heterogeneous
tabular data. Using this system, human resource specialists can interactively
inspect the relationships between two attributes of prospective employees
across multiple years. Further, we demonstrate the usability of Panacea with
representative examples for finding hidden trends in real-world datasets and
then describe HR specialists' feedback obtained throughout Panacea's
development. The proposed Panacea system enables HR specialists to visually
explore the annual recruitment of new graduates
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