Visualisation of Parallel Data Streams with Temporal Mosaics

Despite its popularity and widespread use, timeline visualisation suffers from shortcomings which limit its use for displaying multiple data streams when the number of streams increases to more than a handful. This paper presents the TemporalMosaic technique for visualisation of parallel time-based streams which addresses some of these shortcomings. Temporal mosaics provide a compact way of representing parallel streams of events by allocating a fixed drawing area to time intervals and partitioning that area according to the number of concurrent events. A user study is presented which compares this technique to a standard timeline representation technique in which events are depicted as horizontal bars and multiple streams are drawn in parallel along a vertical axis. Results of this user study show that users of the temporal mosaic visualisation perform significantly better at detecting concurrency, interval overlaps and inactivity than users of standard timelines

A Framework for collaborative writing with recording and post-meeting retrieval capabilities

From a HCI perspective, elucidating and supporting the context in which collaboration takes place is key to implementing successful collaborative systems. Synchronous collaborative writing usually takes place in contexts involving a “meeting” of some sort. Collaborative writing meetings can be face-to-face or, increasingly, remote Internet-based meetings. The latter presents software developers with the possibility of incorporating multimedia recording and information retrieval capabilities into the collaborative environment. The collaborative writing that ensues can be seen as an activity encompassing asynchronous as well as synchronous aspects. In order for revisions, information retrieval and other forms of post-meeting, asynchronous work to be effectively supported, the synchronous collaborative editor must be able to appropriately detect and record meeting metadata. This paper presents a collaborative editor that supports recording of user actions and explicit metadata production. Design and technical implications of introducing such capabilities are discussed with respect to document segmentation, consistency control, and awareness mechanisms

Mass data exploration in oncology: An information synthesis approach

New technologies and equipment allow for mass treatment of samples and research teams share acquired data on an always larger scale. In this context scientists are facing a major data exploitation problem. More precisely, using these data sets through data mining tools or introducing them in a classical experimental approach require a preliminary understanding of the information space, in order to direct the process. But acquiring this grasp on the data is a complex activity, which is seldom supported by current software tools. The goal of this paper is to introduce a solution to this scientific data grasp problem. Illustrated in the Tissue MicroArrays application domain, the proposal is based on the synthesis notion, which is inspired by Information Retrieval paradigms. The envisioned synthesis model gives a central role to the study the researcher wants to conduct, through the task notion. It allows for the implementation of a task-oriented Information Retrieval prototype system. Cases studies and user studies were used to validate this prototype system. It opens interesting prospects for the extension of the model or extensions towards other application domains

The World-Wide Web past present and future, and its application to medicine

The World-Wide Web was first developed as a tool for collaboration in the high energy physics community. From there it spread rapidly to other fields, and grew to its present impressive size. As an easy way to access information, it has been a great success, and a huge number of medical applications have taken advantage of it. But there is another side to the Web, its potential as a tool for collaboration between people. Medical examples include telemedicine and teaching. New technical developments offer still greater potential in medical and other fields. This paper gives some background to the early development of the World-Wide Web, a brief overview of its present state with some examples relevant to medicine, and a look at the future

MyEvents: a personal visual analytics approach for mining key events and knowledge discovery in support of personal reminiscence

Reminiscence is an important aspect in our life. It preserves precious memories, allows us to form our own identities and encourages us to accept the past. Our work takes advantage of modern sensor technologies to support reminiscence, enabling self-monitoring of personal activities and individual movement in space and time on a daily basis. This paper presents MyEvents, a web-based personal visual analytics platform designed for non-computing experts, that allows for the collection of long-term location and movement data and the generation of event mementos. Our research is focused on two prominent goals in event reminiscence: 1) selection subjectivity and human involvement in the process of self knowledge discovery and memento creation; and 2) the enhancement of event familiarity by presenting target events and their related information for optimal memory recall and reminiscence. A novel multi-significance event ranking model is proposed to determine significant events in the personal history according to user preferences for event category, frequency and regularity. The evaluation results show that MyEvents effectively fulfils the reminiscence goals and tasks.