Service-oriented visualization applied to medical data analysis

With the era of Grid computing, data driven experiments and simulations have become very advanced and complicated. To allow specialists from various domains to deal with large datasets, aside from developing efficient extraction techniques, it is necessary to have available computational facilities to visualize and interact with the results of an extraction process. Having this in mind, we developed an Interactive Visualization Framework, which supports a service-oriented architecture. This framework allows, on one hand visualization experts to construct visualizations to view and interact with large datasets, and on the other hand end-users (e.g., medical specialists) to explore these visualizations irrespective of their geographical location and available computing resources. The image-based analysis of vascular disorders served as a case study for this project. The paper presents main research findings and reports on the current implementation status

On the role of individual human abilities in the design of adaptive user interfaces for scientific problem solving environments

A scientific problem solving environment should be built in such a way that users (scientists) might exploit underlying technologies without a specialised knowledge about available tools and resources. An adaptive user interface can be considered as an opportunity in addressing this challenge. This paper explores the importance of individual human abilities in the design of adaptive user interfaces for scientific problem solving environments. In total, seven human factors (gender, learning abilities, locus of control, attention focus, cognitive strategy and verbal and nonverbal IQs) have been evaluated regarding their impact on interface adjustments done manually by users. People’s preferences for different interface configurations have been investigated. The experimental study suggests criteria for the inclusion of human factors into the user model guiding and controlling the adaptation process. To provide automatic means of adaptation, the Intelligent System for User Modelling has been developed