35-Issue 3

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/15270

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EuroVis 2016: Frontmatter
(Eurographics Association, 2016) Kwan-Liu Ma; Giuseppe Santucci; Jarke van Wijk;
Visual Analysis of Spatial Variability and Global Correlations in Ensembles of Iso-Contours
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Ferstl, Florian; Kanzler, Mathias; Rautenhaus, Marc; Westermann, Rüdiger; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
For an ensemble of iso-contours in multi-dimensional scalar fields, we present new methods to a) visualize their dominant spatial patterns of variability, and b) to compute the conditional probability of the occurrence of a contour at one location given the occurrence at some other location. We first show how to derive a statistical model describing the contour variability, by representing the contours implicitly via signed distance functions and clustering similar functions in a reduced order space. We show that the spatial patterns of the ensemble can then be derived by analytically transforming the boundaries of a confidence interval computed from each cluster into the spatial domain. Furthermore, we introduce a mathematical basis for computing correlations between the occurrences of iso-contours at different locations. We show that the computation of these correlations can be posed in the reduced order space as an integration problem over a region bounded by four hyper-planes. To visualize the derived statistical properties we employ a variant of variability plots for streamlines, now including the color coding of probabilities of joint contour occurrences. We demonstrate the use of the proposed techniques for ensemble exploration in a number of 2D and 3D examples, using artificial and meteorological data sets.
PhysioEx: Visual Analysis of Physiological Event Streams
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Kamaleswaran, Rishikesan; Collins, Christopher; James, Andrew; McGregor, Carolyn; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
In this work, we introduce a novel visualization technique, the Temporal Intensity Map, which visually integrates data values over time to reveal the frequency, duration, and timing of significant features in streaming data. We combine the Temporal Intensity Map with several coordinated visualizations of detected events in data streams to create PhysioEx, a visual dashboard for multiple heterogeneous data streams. We have applied PhysioEx in a design study in the field of neonatal medicine, to support clinical researchers exploring physiologic data streams. We evaluated our method through consultations with domain experts. Results show that our tool provides deep insight capabilities, supports hypothesis generation, and can be well integrated into the workflow of clinical researchers.
Space-Time Bifurcation Lines for Extraction of 2D Lagrangian Coherent Structures
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Machado, Gustavo Mello; Boblest, Sebastian; Ertl, Thomas; Sadlo, Filip; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
We present a novel and efficient technique to extract Lagrangian coherent structures in two-dimensional time-dependent vector fields. We show that this can be achieved by employing bifurcation line extraction in the space-time representation of the vector field, and generating space-time bifurcation manifolds therefrom. To show the utility and applicability of our approach, we provide an evaluation of existing extraction techniques for Lagrangian coherent structures, and compare them to our approach.
There is More to Streamgraphs than Movies: Better Aesthetics via Ordering and Lassoing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Bartolomeo, Marco Di; Hu, Yifan; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
Streamgraphs were popularized in 2008 when The New York Times used them to visualize box office revenues for 7500 movies over 21 years. The aesthetics of a streamgraph is affected by three components: the ordering of the layers, the shape of the lowest curve of the drawing, known as the baseline, and the labels for the layers. As of today, the ordering and baseline computation algorithms proposed in the paper of Byron and Wattenberg are still considered the state of the art. However, their ordering algorithm exploits statistical properties of the movie revenue data that may not hold in other data. In addition, the baseline optimization is based on a definition of visual energy that in some cases results in considerable amount of visual distortion. We offer an ordering algorithm that works well regardless of the properties of the input data, and propose a 1-norm based definition of visual energy and the associated solution method that overcomes the limitation of the original baseline optimization procedure. Furthermore, we propose an efficient layer labeling algorithm that scales linearly to the data size in place of the brute-force algorithm adopted by Byron and Wattenberg. We demonstrate the advantage of our algorithms over existing techniques on a number of real world data sets.
Using Visualization to Explore Original and Anonymized LBSN Data
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Tarameshloo, Ebrahim; Loorak, Mona Hosseinkhani; Fong, Philip W. L.; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
We present GSUVis, a visualization tool designed to provide better understanding of location-based social network (LBSN) data. LBSN data is one of the most important sources of information for transportation, marketing, health, and public safety. LBSN data consumers are interested in accessing and analysing data that is as complete and as accurate as possible. However, LBSN data contains sensitive information about individuals. Consequently, data anonymization is of critical importance if this data is to be made available to consumers. However, anonymization commonly reduces the utility of information available. Working with privacy experts, we designed GSUVis a visual analytic tool to help experts better understand the effects of anonymization techniques on LBSN data utility. One of GSUVis's primary goals is to make it possible for people to use LBSN data, without requiring them to gain deep knowledge about data anonymization. To inform the design of GSUVis, we interviewed privacy experts, and collected their tasks and system requirements. Based on this understanding, we designed and implemented GSUVis. It applies two anonymization algorithms for social and location trajectory data to a real-world LBSN dataset and visualizes the data both before and after anonymization. Through feedback from domain experts, we reflect on the effectiveness of GSUVis and the impact of anonymization using visualization.
Time-Series Plots Integrated in Parallel-Coordinates Displays
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Gruendl, Henning; Riehmann, Patrick; Pausch, Yves; Froehlich, Bernd; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
We present a natural extension of two-dimensional parallel-coordinates plots for revealing relationships in time-dependent multi-attribute data by building on the idea that time can be considered as the third dimension. A time slice through the visualization represents a certain point in time and can be viewed as a regular parallel-coordinates display. A vertical slice through one of the axes of the parallel-coordinates display would show a time-series plot. For a focus-and-context integration of both views, we embed time-series plots between two adjacent axes of the parallel-coordinates plot. Both time-series plots are drawn using a pseudo three-dimensional perspective with a single vanishing point. An independent parallel-coordinates panel that connects the two perspectively displayed time-series plots can move forward and backward in time to reveal changes in the relationship between the time-dependent attributes. The visualization of time-series plots in the context of the parallelcoordinates plot facilitates the exploration of time-related aspects of the data without the need to switch to a separate display. We provide a consistent set of tools for selecting and contrasting subsets of the data, which are important for various application domains.
Designing Multiple Coordinated Visualizations for Tablets
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Sadana, Ramik; Stasko, John; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
The use of multiple coordinated views (MCV) in data visualization provides analytic power because it allows a person to explore data under a variety of different perspectives. Since this design pattern utilizes multiple visualizations and requires coordinated interactions across the views, a clever use of screen space is vital and many synchronized interface operations must be provided. Bringing this design pattern to tablet computers is challenging due to their small display size and the absence of keyboard and mouse input. In this article, we explain important design considerations for MCV visualization on tablets and describe a prototype MCV visualization system we have built for the iPad. The design is based on the principles of maximizing screen space for data presentation, promoting consistent interactions across visualizations, and minimizing occlusion from a person's hands.
Arcs, Angles, or Areas: Individual Data Encodings in Pie and Donut Charts
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Skau, Drew; Kosara, Robert; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
Pie and donut charts have been a hotly debated topic in the visualization community for some time now. Even though pie charts have been around for over 200 years, our understanding of the perceptual factors used to read data in them is still limited. Data is encoded in pie and donut charts in three ways: arc length, center angle, and segment area. For our first study, we designed variations of pie charts to test the importance of individual encodings for reading accuracy. In our second study, we varied the inner radius of a donut chart from a filled pie to a thin outline to test the impact of removing the central angle. Both studies point to angle being the least important visual cue for both charts, and the donut chart being as accurate as the traditional pie chart.
Retailoring Box Splines to Lattices for Highly Isotropic Volume Representations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Csébfalvi, Balázs; Rácz, Gergely; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
3D box splines are defined by convolving a 1D box function with itself along different directions. In volume visualization, box splines are mainly used as reconstruction kernels that are easy to adapt to various sampling lattices, such as the Cartesian Cubic (CC), Body-Centered Cubic (BCC), and Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) lattices. The usual way of tailoring a box spline to a specific lattice is to span the box spline by exactly those principal directions that span the lattice itself. However, in this case, the preferred directions of the box spline and the lattice are the same, amplifying the anisotropic effects of each other. This leads to an anisotropic volume representation with strongly preferred directions. Therefore, in this paper, we retailor box splines to lattices such that the sets of vectors that span the box spline and the lattice are disjoint sets. As the preferred directions of the box spline and the lattice compensate each other, a more isotropic volume representation can be achieved. We demonstrate this by comparing different combinations of box splines and lattices concerning their anisotropic behavior in tomographic reconstruction and volume visualization.
Exploring Items and Features with IF,FI-Tables
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Corput, Paul van der; Wijk, Jarke J. van; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
The exploration of high-dimensional data is challenging because humans have difficulty to understand more than three dimensions. We present a new visualization concept that enables users to explore such data and, specifically, to learn about important items and features that are unknown or overlooked, based on the items and features that are already known. The visualization consists of two juxtaposed tables: an IF-Table, showing all items with a selection of features; and an FI-Table, showing all features with a selection of items. This enables the user to limit the number of visible items and features to those needed for the exploration. The interaction is kept simple: each selection of items and features results in a complete overview of similar and relevant items and features.
Comparing Bar Chart Authoring with Microsoft Excel and Tangible Tiles
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Wun, Tiffany; Payne, Jennifer; Huron, Samuel; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
Providing tools that make visualization authoring accessible to visualization non-experts is a major research challenge. Currently the most common approach to generating a visualization is to use software that quickly and automatically produces visualizations based on templates. However, it has recently been suggested that constructing a visualization with tangible tiles may be a more accessible method, especially for people without visualization expertise. There is still much to be learned about the differences between these two visualization authoring practices. To better understand how people author visualizations in these two conditions, we ran a qualitative study comparing the use of software to the use of tangible tiles, for the creation of bar charts. Close observation of authoring activities showed how each of the following varied according to the tool used: 1) sequences of action; 2) distribution of time spent on different aspects of the InfoVis pipeline; 3) pipeline task separation; and 4) freedom to manipulate visual variables. From these observations, we discuss the implications of the variations in activity sequences, noting tool design considerations and pointing to future research questions.
Composite Flow Maps
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Cornel, Daniel; Konev, Artem; Sadransky, Bernhard; Horváth, Zsolt; Brambilla, Andrea; Viola, Ivan; Waser, Jürgen; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
Flow maps are widely used to provide an overview of geospatial transportation data. Existing solutions lack the support for the interactive exploration of multiple flow components at once. Flow components are given by different materials being transported, different flow directions, or by the need for comparing alternative scenarios. In this paper, we combine flows as individual ribbons in one composite flow map. The presented approach can handle an arbitrary number of sources and sinks. To avoid visual clutter, we simplify our flow maps based on a force-driven algorithm, accounting for restrictions with respect to application semantics. The goal is to preserve important characteristics of the geospatial context. This feature also enables us to highlight relevant spatial information on top of the flow map such as traffic conditions or accessibility. The flow map is computed on the basis of flows between zones. We describe a method for auto-deriving zones from geospatial data according to application requirements. We demonstrate the method in real-world applications, including transportation logistics, evacuation procedures, and water simulation. Our results are evaluated with experts from corresponding fields.
Visual Analysis of Governing Topological Structures in Excitable Network Dynamics
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Ngo, Quynh Quang; Hütt, Marc-Thorsten; Linsen, Lars; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
To understand how topology shapes the dynamics in excitable networks is one of the fundamental problems in network science when applied to computational systems biology and neuroscience. Recent advances in the field discovered the influential role of two macroscopic topological structures, namely hubs and modules. We propose a visual analytics approach that allows for a systematic exploration of the role of those macroscopic topological structures on the dynamics in excitable networks. Dynamical patterns are discovered using the dynamical features of excitation ratio and co-activation. Our approach is based on the interactive analysis of the correlation of topological and dynamical features using coordinated views. We designed suitable visual encodings for both the topological and the dynamical features. A degree map and an adjacency matrix visualization allow for the interaction with hubs and modules, respectively. A barycentric-coordinates layout and a multi-dimensional scaling approach allow for the analysis of excitation ratio and co-activation, respectively. We demonstrate how the interplay of the visual encodings allows us to quickly reconstruct recent findings in the field within an interactive analysis and even discovered new patterns. We apply our approach to network models of commonly investigated topologies as well as to the structural networks representing the connectomes of different species. We evaluate our approach with domain experts in terms of its intuitiveness, expressiveness, and usefulness.
BubbleNet: A Cyber Security Dashboard for Visualizing Patterns
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) McKenna, Sean; Staheli, Diane; Fulcher, Cody; Meyer, Miriah; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
The field of cyber security is faced with ever-expanding amounts of data and a constant barrage of cyber attacks. Within this space, we have designed BubbleNet as a cyber security dashboard to help network analysts identify and summarize patterns within the data. This design study faced a range of interesting constraints from limited time with various expert users and working with users beyond the network analyst, such as network managers. To overcome these constraints, the design study employed a user-centered design process and a variety of methods to incorporate user feedback throughout the design of BubbleNet. This approach resulted in a successfully evaluated dashboard with users and further deployments of these ideas in both research and operational environments. By explaining these methods and the process, it can benefit future visualization designers to help overcome similar challenges in cyber security or alternative domains.
Pathfinder: Visual Analysis of Paths in Graphs
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Partl, Christian; Gratzl, Samuel; Streit, Marc; Wassermann, Anne-Mai; Pfister, Hanspeter; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Lex, Alexander; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
The analysis of paths in graphs is highly relevant in many domains. Typically, path-related tasks are performed in node-link layouts. Unfortunately, graph layouts often do not scale to the size of many real world networks. Also, many networks are multivariate, i.e., contain rich attribute sets associated with the nodes and edges. These attributes are often critical in judging paths, but directly visualizing attributes in a graph layout exacerbates the scalability problem. In this paper, we present visual analysis solutions dedicated to path-related tasks in large and highly multivariate graphs. We show that by focusing on paths, we can address the scalability problem of multivariate graph visualization, equipping analysts with a powerful tool to explore large graphs. We introduce Pathfinder, a technique that provides visual methods to query paths, while considering various constraints. The resulting set of paths is visualized in both a ranked list and as a node-link diagram. For the paths in the list, we display rich attribute data associated with nodes and edges, and the node-link diagram provides topological context. The paths can be ranked based on topological properties, such as path length or average node degree, and scores derived from attribute data. Pathfinder is designed to scale to graphs with tens of thousands of nodes and edges by employing strategies such as incremental query results. We demonstrate Pathfinder's fitness for use in scenarios with data from a coauthor network and biological pathways.
AVOCADO: Visualization of Workflow-Derived Data Provenance for Reproducible Biomedical Research
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Stitz, Holger; Luger, Stefan; Streit, Marc; Gehlenborg, Nils; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
A major challenge in data-driven biomedical research lies in the collection and representation of data provenance information to ensure that findings are reproducibile. In order to communicate and reproduce multi-step analysis workflows executed on datasets that contain data for dozens or hundreds of samples, it is crucial to be able to visualize the provenance graph at different levels of aggregation. Most existing approaches are based on node-link diagrams, which do not scale to the complexity of typical data provenance graphs. In our proposed approach, we reduce the complexity of the graph using hierarchical and motif-based aggregation. Based on user action and graph attributes, a modular degree-of-interest (DoI) function is applied to expand parts of the graph that are relevant to the user. This interest-driven adaptive approach to provenance visualization allows users to review and communicate complex multi-step analyses, which can be based on hundreds of files that are processed by numerous workflows. We have integrated our approach into an analysis platform that captures extensive data provenance information, and demonstrate its effectiveness by means of a biomedical usage scenario.
ConToVi: Multi-Party Conversation Exploration using Topic-Space Views
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) El-Assady, Mennatallah; Gold, Valentin; Acevedo, Carmela; Collins, Christopher; Keim, Daniel; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
We introduce a novel visual analytics approach to analyze speaker behavior patterns in multi-party conversations. We propose Topic-Space Views to track the movement of speakers across the thematic landscape of a conversation. Our tool is designed to assist political science scholars in exploring the dynamics of a conversation over time to generate and prove hypotheses about speaker interactions and behavior patterns. Moreover, we introduce a glyph-based representation for each speaker turn based on linguistic and statistical cues to abstract relevant text features. We present animated views for exploring the general behavior and interactions of speakers over time and interactive steady visualizations for the detailed analysis of a selection of speakers. Using a visual sedimentation metaphor we enable the analysts to track subtle changes in the flow of a conversation over time while keeping an overview of all past speaker turns. We evaluate our approach on real-world datasets and the results have been insightful to our domain experts.
Visual Analysis of Defects in Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymers for 4DCT Interrupted In situ Tests
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Amirkhanov, Alexander; Amirkhanov, Artem; Salaberger, Dietmar; Kastner, Johann; Gröller, Eduard; Heinzl, Christoph; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
Material engineers use interrupted in situ tensile testing to investigate the damage mechanisms in composite materials. For each subsequent scan, the load is incrementally increased until the specimen is completely fractured. During the interrupted in situ testing of glass fiber reinforced polymers (GFRPs) defects of four types are expected to appear: matrix fracture, fiber/matrix debonding, fiber pull-out, and fiber fracture. There is a growing demand for the detection and analysis of these defects among the material engineers. In this paper, we present a novel workflow for the detection, classification, and visual analysis of defects in GFRPs using interrupted in situ tensile tests in combination with X-ray Computed Tomography. The workflow is based on the automatic extraction of defects and fibers. We introduce the automatic Defect Classifier assigning the most suitable type to each defect based on its geometrical features. We present a visual analysis system that integrates four visualization methods: 1) the Defect Viewer highlights defects with visually encoded type in the context of the original CT image, 2) the Defect Density Maps provide an overview of the defect distributions according to type in 2D and 3D, 3) the Final Fracture Surface estimates the material fracture's location and displays it as a 3D surface, 4) the 3D Magic Lens enables interactive exploration by combining detailed visualizations in the region of interest with overview visualizations as context. In collaboration with material engineers, we evaluate our solution and demonstrate its practical applicability.
Source Inversion by Forward Integration in Inertial Flows
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Günther, Tobias; Theisel, Holger; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
Inertial particles are finite-sized objects traveling with a certain velocity that differs from the underlying carrying flow, i.e., they are mass-dependent and subject to inertia. Their backward integration is in practice infeasible, since a slight change in the initial velocity causes extreme changes in the recovered position. Thus, if an inertial particle is observed, it is difficult to recover where it came from. This is known as the source inversion problem, which has many practical applications in recovering the source of airborne or waterborne pollutions. Inertial trajectories live in a higher dimensional spatio-velocity space. In this paper, we show that this space is only sparsely populated. Assuming that inertial particles are released with a given initial velocity (e.g., from rest), particles may reach a certain location only with a limited set of possible velocities. In fact, with increasing integration duration and dependent on the particle response time, inertial particles converge to a terminal velocity. We show that the set of initial positions that lead to the same location form a curve. We extract these curves by devising a derived vector field in which they appear as tangent curves. Most importantly, the derived vector field only involves forward integrated flow map gradients, which are much more stable to compute than backward trajectories. After extraction, we interactively visualize the curves in the domain and display the reached velocities using glyphs. In addition, we encode the rate of change of the terminal velocity along the curves, which gives a notion for the convergence to the terminal velocity. With this, we present the first solution to the source inversion problem that considers actual inertial trajectories. We apply the method to steady and unsteady flows in both 2D and 3D domains.

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