Temporal data visualizations for Air Traffic Controllers (ATC)

International audienceFundamental research in visualization is concerned with the impact of presentation on visual perception and understanding [5] [6]. In current Air Traffic Control (ATC) environments, Air Traffic Controllers (ATCo) use several visualization systems: radar views, timelines, electronic strips, meteorological views, supervisions etc... The information displayed is intrinsically temporal: aircraft positions that evolve over time, conflicts between aircraft at a given time, airspace congestions... Each of these visualizations is rich and dynamic: it displays numerous visual entities that move and evolve over time. Furthermore, this considerable volume of information must be understandable with a minimum cognitive workload. As traffic increases and safety criteria become more demanding ATC requires this new kind of visualizations. Our research focuses on the production of new efficient visualizations with temporal data. We characterize a more efficient visualization as one in which a greater volume of information can be perceived and understood with a smaller or equivalent cognitive workload (while at the same time reducing the error rate in the perception of the information)

Improving Big Data Visual Analytics with Interactive Virtual Reality

For decades, the growth and volume of digital data collection has made it challenging to digest large volumes of information and extract underlying structure. Coined 'Big Data', massive amounts of information has quite often been gathered inconsistently (e.g from many sources, of various forms, at different rates, etc.). These factors impede the practices of not only processing data, but also analyzing and displaying it in an efficient manner to the user. Many efforts have been completed in the data mining and visual analytics community to create effective ways to further improve analysis and achieve the knowledge desired for better understanding. Our approach for improved big data visual analytics is two-fold, focusing on both visualization and interaction. Given geo-tagged information, we are exploring the benefits of visualizing datasets in the original geospatial domain by utilizing a virtual reality platform. After running proven analytics on the data, we intend to represent the information in a more realistic 3D setting, where analysts can achieve an enhanced situational awareness and rely on familiar perceptions to draw in-depth conclusions on the dataset. In addition, developing a human-computer interface that responds to natural user actions and inputs creates a more intuitive environment. Tasks can be performed to manipulate the dataset and allow users to dive deeper upon request, adhering to desired demands and intentions. Due to the volume and popularity of social media, we developed a 3D tool visualizing Twitter on MIT's campus for analysis. Utilizing emerging technologies of today to create a fully immersive tool that promotes visualization and interaction can help ease the process of understanding and representing big data.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 2015 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC '15); corrected typo

What’s Past is Prologue

Over one hundred presentations from the 37th annual Charleston Library Conference (held November 6–10, 2017) are included in this annual proceedings volume. Major themes of the meeting included data visualization, analysis and assessment of collections and library users, demand-driven acquisition, the future of print collections, and open access publishing. While the Charleston meeting remains a core one for acquisitions librarians in dialog with publishers and vendors, the breadth of coverage of this volume reflects the fact that this conference continues to be one of the major venues for leaders in the publishing and library communities to shape strategy and prepare for the future. Almost 2,000 delegates attended the 2017 meeting, ranging from the staff of small public library systems to the CEOs of major corporations. This fully indexed, copyedited volume provides a rich source for the latest evidence-based research and lessons from practice in a range of information science fields. The contributors are leaders in the library, publishing, and vendor communities

Living Globe: Tridimensional interactive visualization of world demographic data

This paper presents Living Globe, an application for visualization of demo- graphic data supporting the temporal comparison of data from several countries represented on a 3D globe. Living Globe allows the visual exploration of the following demographic data: total population, population density and growth, crude birth and death rates, life expectancy, net migration and population per- centage of different age groups. While offering unexperienced users a default mapping of these data variables into visual variables, Living Globe allows more advanced users to select the mapping, increasing its flexibility. The main aspects of the Living Globe model and prototype are described as well as the evaluation results obtained using heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Some conclusions and ideas for future work are also presented.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, submitted to HCII 2016 Conference (Toronto, Canada), published on Human Interface and the Management of Information: Information, Design and Interaction Volume 9734 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 14-2

Inviwo -- A Visualization System with Usage Abstraction Levels

The complexity of today's visualization applications demands specific visualization systems tailored for the development of these applications. Frequently, such systems utilize levels of abstraction to improve the application development process, for instance by providing a data flow network editor. Unfortunately, these abstractions result in several issues, which need to be circumvented through an abstraction-centered system design. Often, a high level of abstraction hides low level details, which makes it difficult to directly access the underlying computing platform, which would be important to achieve an optimal performance. Therefore, we propose a layer structure developed for modern and sustainable visualization systems allowing developers to interact with all contained abstraction levels. We refer to this interaction capabilities as usage abstraction levels, since we target application developers with various levels of experience. We formulate the requirements for such a system, derive the desired architecture, and present how the concepts have been exemplary realized within the Inviwo visualization system. Furthermore, we address several specific challenges that arise during the realization of such a layered architecture, such as communication between different computing platforms, performance centered encapsulation, as well as layer-independent development by supporting cross layer documentation and debugging capabilities