Visualising Business Data: A Survey

A rapidly increasing number of businesses rely on visualisation solutions for their data management challenges. This demand stems from an industry-wide shift towards data-driven approaches to decision making and problem-solving. However, there is an overwhelming mass of heterogeneous data collected as a result. The analysis of these data become a critical and challenging part of the business process. Employing visual analysis increases data comprehension thus enabling a wider range of users to interpret the underlying behaviour, as opposed to skilled but expensive data analysts. Widening the reach to an audience with a broader range of backgrounds creates new opportunities for decision making, problem-solving, trend identification, and creative thinking. In this survey, we identify trends in business visualisation and visual analytic literature where visualisation is used to address data challenges and identify areas in which industries use visual design to develop their understanding of the business environment. Our novel classification of literature includes the topics of businesses intelligence, business ecosystem, customer-centric. This survey provides a valuable overview and insight into the business visualisation literature with a novel classification that highlights both mature and less developed research directions

Visualisation of Large-Scale Call-Centre Data

The contact centre industry employs 4% of the entire United King-dom and United States’ working population and generates gigabytes of operational data that require analysis, to provide insight and to improve efficiency. This thesis is the result of a collaboration with QPC Limited who provide data collection and analysis products for call centres. They provided a large data-set featuring almost 5 million calls to be analysed. This thesis utilises novel visualisation techniques to create tools for the exploration of the large, complex call centre data-set and to facilitate unique observations into the data.A survey of information visualisation books is presented, provid-ing a thorough background of the field. Following this, a feature-rich application that visualises large call centre data sets using scatterplots that support millions of points is presented. The application utilises both the CPU and GPU acceleration for processing and filtering and is exhibited with millions of call events.This is expanded upon with the use of glyphs to depict agent behaviour in a call centre. A technique is developed to cluster over-lapping glyphs into a single parent glyph dependant on zoom level and a customizable distance metric. This hierarchical glyph repre-sents the mean value of all child agent glyphs, removing overlap and reducing visual clutter. A novel technique for visualising individually tailored glyphs using a Graphics Processing Unit is also presented, and demonstrated rendering over 100,000 glyphs at interactive frame rates. An open-source code example is provided for reproducibility.Finally, a novel interaction and layout method is introduced for improving the scalability of chord diagrams to visualise call transfers. An exploration of sketch-based methods for showing multiple links and direction is made, and a sketch-based brushing technique for filtering is proposed. Feedback from domain experts in the call centre industry is reported for all applications developed

Visualization methods for analysis of 3D multi-scale medical data

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Aeronautical Engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 110

This bibliography lists 504 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in May 1979

A concurrent design facility architecture for education and research in multi-disciplinary design of complex systems

Engineering design processes applied in the industry focuses more towards a concurrent approach rather than traditional sequential design, because of its potential to improve lead-time, quality and reducing cost. In Concurrent Design (CD) or concurrent engineering (CE), all elements of the product life cycle are included and considered simultaneously during the design process. CE is also known as Collaborative Engineering. Over the last two decades, industries have applied a dedicated CD environment, representing an infrastructure of integrated hardware and software, where multi-disciplinary design teams work together collaboratively on a specific project. Graduates moving into engineering design will become more involved in CD and the use of so-called Concurrent Design Facilities (CDF). Therefore, universities need to adopt their design curriculums and expose students to CD principles to make them work-ready for this new environment. The objectives of this thesis are to investigate the design engineering education approaches in universities, with a focus on aerospace engineering, and to identify the requirements for a concurrent design facility specifically for design education and research. The thesis gives give special attentions to the design of concurrent design facility that are low-cost, adaptable, and easy to use and its role in the overall design curriculums