A Review and Characterization of Progressive Visual Analytics

Progressive Visual Analytics (PVA) has gained increasing attention over the past years. It brings the user into the loop during otherwise long-running and non-transparent computations by producing intermediate partial results. These partial results can be shown to the user for early and continuous interaction with the emerging end result even while it is still being computed. Yet as clear-cut as this fundamental idea seems, the existing body of literature puts forth various interpretations and instantiations that have created a research domain of competing terms, various definitions, as well as long lists of practical requirements and design guidelines spread across different scientific communities. This makes it more and more difficult to get a succinct understanding of PVA’s principal concepts, let alone an overview of this increasingly diverging field. The review and discussion of PVA presented in this paper address these issues and provide (1) a literature collection on this topic, (2) a conceptual characterization of PVA, as well as (3) a consolidated set of practical recommendations for implementing and using PVA-based visual analytics solutions

Progressive Analytics: A Computation Paradigm for Exploratory Data Analysis

Exploring data requires a fast feedback loop from the analyst to the system, with a latency below about 10 seconds because of human cognitive limitations. When data becomes large or analysis becomes complex, sequential computations can no longer be completed in a few seconds and data exploration is severely hampered. This article describes a novel computation paradigm called Progressive Computation for Data Analysis or more concisely Progressive Analytics, that brings at the programming language level a low-latency guarantee by performing computations in a progressive fashion. Moving this progressive computation at the language level relieves the programmer of exploratory data analysis systems from implementing the whole analytics pipeline in a progressive way from scratch, streamlining the implementation of scalable exploratory data analysis systems. This article describes the new paradigm through a prototype implementation called ProgressiVis, and explains the requirements it implies through examples.Comment: 10 page

The roundtable: an abstract model of conversation dynamics

Is it possible to abstract a formal mechanism originating schisms and governing the size evolution of social conversations? In this work a constructive solution to such problem is proposed: an abstract model of a generic N-party turn-taking conversation. The model develops from simple yet realistic assumptions derived from experimental evidence, abstracts from conversation content and semantics while including topological information, and is driven by stochastic dynamics. We find that a single mechanism - namely the dynamics of conversational party's individual fitness, as related to conversation size - controls the development of the self-organized schisming phenomenon. Potential generalizations of the model - including individual traits and preferences, memory effects and more elaborated conversational topologies - may find important applications also in other fields of research, where dynamically-interacting and networked agents play a fundamental role.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulatio

Citizen-led Work using Social Computing and Procedural Guidance

Online platforms enable people to interact with friends, family, and the world at large. How might people go beyond sharing stories and ideas to building and testing theories in the real world? While many are motivated to dig deeper into their lived experience, limited expertise and lack of platform support make complex activities like experimentation dauntingly hard. Novices benefit greatly from expert guidance: this thesis advocates baking the guidance into the interface itself.This dissertation introduces procedural guidance to build just-in-time expertise for difficult tasks. Procedural guidance has multiple advantages: it is minimal, leverages teachable moments, and can be ability-specific. This dissertation instantiates this insight of procedural guidance through a sequence of increasingly complex social computing systems: Gut Instinct for curating ideas, Docent for generating hypotheses, and Galileo for citizen-led experiments.Gut Instinct hosts online learning materials and enables people to collaboratively brainstorm potential influences on people’s microbiome. Docent explicitly teaches people to create hypotheses by combining personal insights and online learning with task-specific scaffolding. Finally, Galileo reifies experimentation in the software, provides multiple roles for contribution, and automatically manages interdependencies. Multiple evaluations—controlled experiments and field deployments with online communities including American Gut participants—demonstrate that procedural guidance enables people to transform intuitions to hypotheses and structurally-sound experiments. By enabling people to draw on lived experience, this dissertation harbingers a future where people can convert their intuitions to actionable plans and implement these plans with online communities. This dissertation concludes by discussing opportunities for complex work using social computing platforms

The future of social is personal: the potential of the personal data store

This chapter argues that technical architectures that facilitate the longitudinal, decentralised and individual-centric personal collection and curation of data will be an important, but partial, response to the pressing problem of the autonomy of the data subject, and the asymmetry of power between the subject and large scale service providers/data consumers. Towards framing the scope and role of such Personal Data Stores (PDSes), the legalistic notion of personal data is examined, and it is argued that a more inclusive, intuitive notion expresses more accurately what individuals require in order to preserve their autonomy in a data-driven world of large aggregators. Six challenges towards realising the PDS vision are set out: the requirement to store data for long periods; the difficulties of managing data for individuals; the need to reconsider the regulatory basis for third-party access to data; the need to comply with international data handling standards; the need to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies; and the need to future-proof data gathering against the evolution of social norms. The open experimental PDS platform INDX is introduced and described, as a means of beginning to address at least some of these six challenges

Designing Persuasive Technology to Reduce Peak Electricity Demand in Ontario Homes

When it comes to environmental sustainability, the time that electricity is consumed matters. For example, using an air conditioner on a hot summer afternoon as the power grid is strained necessitates the use of more polluting sources to meet demand. There are a number of ways to target a reduction in peak demand: better electricity storage technology, for one, has the potential to level out these peaks. In the meantime, electrical utilities aim to incentivize a reduction in demand from households at these times through programs such as Time-of-Use Pricing, and critical peak demand response programs, such as peaksaver in Ontario. However, the effectiveness of these programs has been limited. In this thesis, we adopted the lens of persuasive technology to improve and support these programs, in order to encourage a reduction in electricity consumption in households at peak load times. To accomplish this, we conducted 18 interviews to examine the practices of households in response to these programs, and learn how they can be improved at the individual level. We found that Time-of-Use pricing encourages shifting some electricity demand, but only when it is convenient. We also found that while potentially effective at a larger scale, the peaksaver program in its current form is unattractive to participants. We then analyzed our findings using existing behaviour change models, including Fogg’s Behaviour Model for Persuasive Design. Using the three aspects of the model – motivation, ability and triggers - we identified where the existing programs are lacking and developed design implications for the design of persuasive technology to support reducing electricity consumption at peak load times. Finally, we designed a smartphone application based on these design implications, and conducted a preliminary evaluation in order to begin to assess their validity

Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like