Applying a User-centred Approach to Interactive Visualization Design

Analysing users in their context of work and finding out how and why they use different information resources is essential to provide interactive visualisation systems that match their goals and needs. Designers should actively involve the intended users throughout the whole process. This chapter presents a user-centered approach for the design of interactive visualisation systems. We describe three phases of the iterative visualisation design process: the early envisioning phase, the global specification hase, and the detailed specification phase. The whole design cycle is repeated until some criterion of success is reached. We discuss different techniques for the analysis of users, their tasks and domain. Subsequently, the design of prototypes and evaluation methods in visualisation practice are presented. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges in design and evaluation of collaborative visualisation environments. Our own case studies and those of others are used throughout the whole chapter to illustrate various approaches

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

The thermal visualisation of latent fingermarks on metallic surfaces

Recent published research has lead to improved techniques for recovering latent fingermarks from metallic surfaces. The present study corroborates and extends some of the work carried out by Bond [1], [2] and [3], but an alternative mechanism is proposed for the thermal visualisation of fingermarks based on differential oxidation and the production of interference colours that improve contrast. Fingermarks treated at low temperature could be reheated to enhance recovery, but an upper temperature limit occurs beyond which the mark degrades. The mechanism of enhancement is discussed

Mapping, sensing and visualising the digital co-presence in the public arena

This paper reports on work carried out within the Cityware project using mobile technologies to map, visualise and project the digital co-presence in the city. This paper focuses on two pilot studies exploring the Bluetooth landscape in the city of Bath. Here we apply adapted and ‘digitally augmented’ methods for spatial observation and analysis based on established methods used extensively in the space syntax approach to urban design. We map the physical and digital flows at a macro level and observe static space use at the micro level. In addition we look at social and mobile behaviour from an individual’s point of view. We apply a method based on intervention through ‘Sensing and projecting’ Bluetooth names and digital identity in the public arena. We present early findings in terms of patterns of Bluetooth flow and presence, and outline initial observations about how people’s reaction towards the projection of their Bluetooth names practices in public. In particular we note the importance of constructing socially meaningful relations between people mediated by these technologies. We discuss initial results and outline issues raised in detail before finally describing ongoing work

Interest rates mapping

The present study deals with the analysis and mapping of Swiss franc interest rates. Interest rates depend on time and maturity, defining term structure of the interest rate curves (IRC). In the present study IRC are considered in a two-dimensional feature space - time and maturity. Geostatistical models and machine learning algorithms (multilayer perceptron and Support Vector Machines) were applied to produce interest rate maps. IR maps can be used for the visualisation and patterns perception purposes, to develop and to explore economical hypotheses, to produce dynamic asses-liability simulations and for the financial risk assessments. The feasibility of an application of interest rates mapping approach for the IRC forecasting is considered as well.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Presented at Applications of Physics in Financial Analysis conference (APFA6), Lisbon, Portugal, 200

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

Assessing mobile mixed reality affordances as a comparative visualization pedagogy for design communication

Spatial visualisation skills and interpretation are critical in the design professions but are difficult for novice designers. There is growing evidence that mixed reality visualisation improves learner outcomes, but often these studies are focused on a single media representation and not on a comparison between media and the underpinning learning outcomes. Results from recent studies highlight the use of comparative visualisation pedagogy in design through learner reflective blogs and pilot studies with experts, but these studies are limited by expense and designs familiar to the learner. With increasing interest in mobile pedagogy, more assessment is required in understanding learner interpretation of comparative mobile mixed reality pedagogy. The aim of this study is to do this by evaluating insights from a first-year architectural design classroom through studying the impact and use of a range of mobile comparative visualisation technologies. Using a design-based research methodology and a usability framework for accessing comparative visualisation, this paper will study the complexities of spatial design in the built environment. Outcomes from the study highlight the positives of the approach but also the improvements required in the delivery of the visualisations to improve on the visibility and visual errors caused by the lack of mobile processing

Design and Implementation of Small Multiples Matrix-based Visualisation to Monitor and Compare Email Socio-organisational Relationships

One of the fundamental organisational questions is how organisations identify anomalies, monitor and compare email communications between staff-staff or staff-clients or staff-customers relationships on a daily basis. The tenacious and substantial relationships are built by the combination of timely replies, frequent engagement and deep interaction between the individuals. To watchdog this periodically, we need an interactive visualisation tool that can help organisational analysts to reconnect some lost relationships and/or strengthen an existing relationship or in some cases identify inside persons (anomalies). From our point of view, Social Intelligence (SI) in an organisation is a combination of self-, social- and organisational-awareness that will help in managing complex socio-organisational changes and can be interpreted in terms of socio-organisational communication efficacy (that is, one's confidence in one's ability to deal with social and organisational information). We considered a case study, an Enron Organisation Email Scandal, to understand the relationships of staff during various parts of the years and we conducted a workshop study with legal experts to gain insights on how they carry out investigation/analysis with respect to email relationships. The outcomes of the workshop helped us develop a novel small multiples matrix-based visualisation in collaboration with our industrial partner, Red Sift UK, to find anomalies, monitor and compare how email relationships change over time and how it defines the meaning of socio-organisational communication efficacy

GOexpress: an R/Bioconductor package for the identification and visualisation of robust gene ontology signatures through supervised learning of gene expression data

Background: Identification of gene expression profiles that differentiate experimental groups is critical for discovery and analysis of key molecular pathways and also for selection of robust diagnostic or prognostic biomarkers. While integration of differential expression statistics has been used to refine gene set enrichment analyses, such approaches are typically limited to single gene lists resulting from simple two-group comparisons or time-series analyses. In contrast, functional class scoring and machine learning approaches provide powerful alternative methods to leverage molecular measurements for pathway analyses, and to compare continuous and multi-level categorical factors. Results: We introduce GOexpress, a software package for scoring and summarising the capacity of gene ontology features to simultaneously classify samples from multiple experimental groups. GOexpress integrates normalised gene expression data (e.g., from microarray and RNA-seq experiments) and phenotypic information of individual samples with gene ontology annotations to derive a ranking of genes and gene ontology terms using a supervised learning approach. The default random forest algorithm allows interactions between all experimental factors, and competitive scoring of expressed genes to evaluate their relative importance in classifying predefined groups of samples. Conclusions: GOexpress enables rapid identification and visualisation of ontology-related gene panels that robustly classify groups of samples and supports both categorical (e.g., infection status, treatment) and continuous (e.g., time-series, drug concentrations) experimental factors. The use of standard Bioconductor extension packages and publicly available gene ontology annotations facilitates straightforward integration of GOexpress within existing computational biology pipelines.Department of Agriculture, Food and the MarineEuropean Commission - Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)Science Foundation IrelandUniversity College Dubli