38-Issue 3

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2632780

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Analysis of Long Molecular Dynamics Simulations Using Interactive Focus+Context Visualization
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Byška, Jan; Trautner, Thomas; Marques, Sérgio M.; Damborský, Jiří; Kozlíková, Barbora; Waldner, Manuela; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Analyzing molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is a key aspect to understand protein dynamics and function. With increasing computational power, it is now possible to generate very long and complex simulations, which are cumbersome to explore using traditional 3D animations of protein movements. Guided by requirements derived from multiple focus groups with protein engineering experts, we designed and developed a novel interactive visual analysis approach for long and crowded MD simulations. In this approach, we link a dynamic 3D focus+context visualization with a 2D chart of time series data to guide the detection and navigation towards important spatio-temporal events. The 3D visualization renders elements of interest in more detail and increases the temporal resolution dependent on the time series data or the spatial region of interest. In case studies with different MD simulation data sets and research questions, we found that the proposed visual analysis approach facilitates exploratory analysis to generate, confirm, or reject hypotheses about causalities. Finally, we derived design guidelines for interactive visual analysis of complex MD simulation data.
Augmenting Tactile 3D Data Navigation With Pressure Sensing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Wang, Xiyao; Besançon, Lonni; Ammi, Mehdi; Isenberg, Tobias; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
We present a pressure-augmented tactile 3D data navigation technique, specifically designed for small devices, motivated by the need to support the interactive visualization beyond traditional workstations. While touch input has been studied extensively on large screens, current techniques do not scale to small and portable devices. We use phone-based pressure sensing with a binary mapping to separate interaction degrees of freedom (DOF) and thus allow users to easily select different manipulation schemes (e. g., users first perform only rotation and then with a simple pressure input to switch to translation). We compare our technique to traditional 3D-RST (rotation, scaling, translation) using a docking task in a controlled experiment. The results show that our technique increases the accuracy of interaction, with limited impact on speed. We discuss the implications for 3D interaction design and verify that our results extend to older devices with pseudo pressure and are valid in realistic phone usage scenarios.
Bird's-Eye - Large-Scale Visual Analytics of City Dynamics using Social Location Data
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Krueger, Robert; Han, Qi; Ivanov, Nikolay; Mahtal, Sanae; Thom, Dennis; Pfister, Hanspeter; Ertl, Thomas; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
The analysis of behavioral city dynamics, such as temporal patterns of visited places and citizens' mobility routines, is an essential task for urban and transportation planning. Social media applications such as Foursquare and Twitter provide access to large-scale and up-to-date dynamic movement data that not only help to understand the social life and pulse of a city but also to maintain and improve urban infrastructure. However, the fast growth rate of this data poses challenges for conventional methods to provide up-to-date, flexible analysis. Therefore, planning authorities barely consider it. We present a system and design study to leverage social media data that assist urban and transportation planners to achieve better monitoring and analysis of city dynamics such as visited places and mobility patterns in large metropolitan areas. We conducted a goal-and-task analysis with urban planning experts. To address these goals, we designed a system with a scalable data monitoring back-end and an interactive visual analytics interface. The monitoring component uses intelligent pre-aggregation to allow dynamic queries in near real-time. The visual analytics interface leverages unsupervised learning to reveal clusters, routines, and unusual behavior in massive data, allowing to understand patterns in time and space. We evaluated our approach based on a qualitative user study with urban planning experts which demonstrates that intuitive integration of advanced analytical tools with visual interfaces is pivotal in making behavioral city dynamics accessible to practitioners. Our interviews also revealed areas for future research.
Bridging the Data Analysis Communication Gap Utilizing a Three-Component Summarized Line Graph
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Yau, Calvin; Karimzadeh, Morteza; Surakitbanharn, Chittayong; Elmqvist, Niklas; Ebert, David; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Communication-minded visualizations are designed to provide their audience-managers, decision-makers, and the public-with new knowledge. Authoring such visualizations effectively is challenging because the audience often lacks the expertise, context, and time that professional analysts have at their disposal to explore and understand datasets. We present a novel summarized line graph visualization technique designed specifically for data analysts to communicate data to decision-makers more effectively and efficiently. Our summarized line graph reduces a large and detailed dataset of multiple quantitative time-series into (1) representative data that provides a quick takeaway of the full dataset; (2) analytical highlights that distinguish specific insights of interest; and (3) a data envelope that summarizes the remaining aggregated data. Our summarized line graph achieved the best overall results when evaluated against line graphs, band graphs, stream graphs, and horizon graphs on four representative tasks.
ChronoCorrelator: Enriching Events with Time Series
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) van Dortmont, Martijn; Elzen, Stef van den; Wijk, Jarke J. van; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Event sequences and time series are widely recorded in many application domains; examples are stock market prices, electronic health records, server operation and performance logs. Common goals for recording are monitoring, root cause analysis and predictive analytics. Current analysis methods generally focus on the exploration of either event sequences or time series. However, deeper insights are gained by combining both. We present a visual analytics approach where users can explore both time series and event data simultaneously, combining visualization, automated methods and human interaction. We enable users to iteratively refine the visualization. Correlations between event sequences and time series can be found by means of an interactive algorithm, which also computes the presence of monotonic effects. We illustrate the effectiveness of our method by applying it to real world and synthetic data sets.
ClustMe: A Visual Quality Measure for Ranking Monochrome Scatterplots based on Cluster Patterns
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Abbas, Mostafa M.; Aupetit, Michaël; Sedlmair, Michael; Bensmail, Halima; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
We propose ClustMe, a new visual quality measure to rank monochrome scatterplots based on cluster patterns. ClustMe is based on data collected from a human-subjects study, in which 34 participants judged synthetically generated cluster patterns in 1000 scatterplots. We generated these patterns by carefully varying the free parameters of a simple Gaussian Mixture Model with two components. and asked the participants to count the number of clusters they could see (1 or more than 1). Based on the results, we form ClustMe by selecting the model that best predicts these human judgments among 7 different state-of-the-art merging techniques (DEMP). To quantitatively evaluate ClustMe, we conducted a second study, in which 31 human subjects ranked 435 pairs of scatterplots of real and synthetic data in terms of cluster patterns complexity. We use this data to compare ClustMe's performance to 4 other state-of-the-art clustering measures, including the well-known Clumpiness scagnostics. We found that of all measures, ClustMe is in strongest agreement with the human rankings.
CV3: Visual Exploration, Assessment, and Comparison of CVs
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Filipov, Velitchko; Arleo, Alessio; Federico, Paolo; Miksch, Silvia; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
The Curriculum Vitae (CV, also referred to as ''résumé'') is an established representation of a person's academic and professional history. A typical CV is comprised of multiple sections associated with spatio-temporal, nominal, hierarchical, and ordinal data. The main task of a recruiter is, given a job application with specific requirements, to compare and assess CVs in order to build a short list of promising candidates to interview. Commonly, this is done by viewing CVs in a side-by-side fashion. This becomes challenging when comparing more than two CVs, because the reader is required to switch attention between them. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the CVs are structured similarly, thus making the overview cluttered and significantly slowing down the comparison process. In order to address these challenges, in this paper we propose ''CV3'', an interactive exploration environment offering users a new way to explore, assess, and compare multiple CVs, to suggest suitable candidates for specific job requirements. We validate our system by means of domain expert feedback whose results highlight both the efficacy of our approach and its limitations. We learned that CV3 eases the overall burden of recruiters thereby assisting them in the selection process.
Designing Animated Transitions to Convey Aggregate Operations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Kim, Younghoon; Correll, Michael; Heer, Jeffrey; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Data can be aggregated in many ways before being visualized in charts, profoundly affecting what a chart conveys. Despite this importance, the type of aggregation is often communicated only via axis titles. In this paper, we investigate the use of animation to disambiguate different types of aggregation and communicate the meaning of aggregate operations. We present design rationales for animated transitions depicting aggregate operations and present the results of an experiment assessing the impact of these different transitions on identification tasks. We find that judiciously staged animated transitions can improve subjects' accuracy at identifying the aggregation performed, though sometimes with longer response times than with static transitions. Through an analysis of participants' rankings and qualitative responses, we find a consistent preference for animation over static transitions and highlight visual features subjects report relying on to make their judgments. We conclude by extending our animation designs to more complex charts of aggregated data such as box plots and bootstrapped confidence intervals.
Efficient Optimal Overlap Removal: Algorithms and Experiments
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Meulemans, Wouter; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Motivated by visualizing spatial data using proportional symbols, we study the following problem: given a set of overlapping squares of varying sizes, minimally displace the squares as to remove the overlap while maintaining the orthogonal order on their centers. Though this problem is NP-hard, we show that rotating the squares by 45 degrees into diamonds allows for a linear or convex quadratic program. It is thus efficiently solvable even for relatively large instances. This positive result and the flexibility offered by constraint programming allow us to study various trade-offs for overlap removal. Specifically, we model and evaluate through computational experiments the relations between displacement, scale and order constraints for static data, and between displacement and temporal coherence for time-varying data. Finally, we also explore the generalization of our methodology to other shapes.
Examining Implicit Discretization in Spectral Schemes
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Quinan, P. Samuel; Padilla, Lace M. K.; Creem-Regehr, Sarah H.; Meyer, Miriah; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Two of the primary reasons rainbow color maps are considered ineffective trace back to the idea that they implicitly discretize encoded data into hue-based bands, yet no research addresses what this discretization looks like or how consistent it is across individuals. This paper presents an exploratory study designed to empirically investigate the implicit discretization of common spectral schemes and explore whether the phenomenon can be modeled by variations in lightness, chroma, and hue. Our results suggest that three commonly used rainbow color maps are implicitly discretized with consistency across individuals. The results also indicate, however, that this implicit discretization varies across different datasets, in a way that suggests the visualization community's understanding of both rainbow color maps, and more generally effective color usage, remains incomplete.
An Exploratory User Study of Visual Causality Analysis
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Yen, Chi-Hsien Eric; Parameswaran, Aditya; Fu, Wai-Tat; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Interactive visualization tools are being used by an increasing number of members of the general public; however, little is known about how, and how well, people use visualizations to infer causality. Adapted from the mediation causal model, we designed an analytic framework to systematically evaluate human performance, strategies, and pitfalls in a visual causal reasoning task. We recruited 24 participants and asked them to identify the mediators in a fictitious dataset using bar charts and scatter plots within our visualization interface. The results showed that the accuracy of their responses as to whether a variable is a mediator significantly decreased when a confounding variable directly influenced the variable being analyzed. Further analysis demonstrated how individual visualization exploration strategies and interfaces might influence reasoning performance. We also identified common strategies and pitfalls in their causal reasoning processes. Design implications for how future visual analytics tools can be designed to better support causal inference are discussed.
Focus+Context Exploration of Hierarchical Embeddings
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Höllt, Thomas; Vilanova, Anna; Pezzotti, Nicola; Lelieveldt, Boudewijn P. F.; Hauser, Helwig; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Hierarchical embeddings, such as HSNE, address critical visual and computational scalability issues of traditional techniques for dimensionality reduction. The improved scalability comes at the cost of the need for increased user interaction for exploration. In this paper, we provide a solution for the interactive visual Focus+Context exploration of such embeddings. We explain how to integrate embedding parts from different levels of detail, corresponding to focus and context groups, in a joint visualization. We devise an according interaction model that relates typical semantic operations on a Focus+Context visualization with the according changes in the level-of-detail-hierarchy of the embedding, including also a mode for comparative Focus+Context exploration and extend HSNE to incorporate the presented interaction model. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we present a use case based on the visual exploration of multi-dimensional images.
Follow The Clicks: Learning and Anticipating Mouse Interactions During Exploratory Data Analysis
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Ottley, Alvitta; Garnett, Roman; Wan, Ran; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
The goal of visual analytics is to create a symbiosis between human and computer by leveraging their unique strengths. While this model has demonstrated immense success, we are yet to realize the full potential of such a human-computer partnership. In a perfect collaborative mixed-initiative system, the computer must possess skills for learning and anticipating the users' needs. Addressing this gap, we propose a framework for inferring attention from passive observations of the user's click, thereby allowing accurate predictions of future events. We demonstrate this technique with a crime map and found that users' clicks can appear in our prediction set 92% - 97% of the time. Further analysis shows that we can achieve high prediction accuracy typically after three clicks. Altogether, we show that passive observations of interaction data can reveal valuable information that will allow the system to learn and anticipate future events.
A Framework for GPU-accelerated Exploration of Massive Time-varying Rectilinear Scalar Volumes
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Marton, Fabio; Agus, Marco; Gobbetti, Enrico; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
We introduce a novel flexible approach to spatiotemporal exploration of rectilinear scalar volumes. Our out-of-core representation, based on per-frame levels of hierarchically tiled non-redundant 3D grids, efficiently supports spatiotemporal random access and streaming to the GPU in compressed formats. A novel low-bitrate codec able to store into fixed-size pages a variable-rate approximation based on sparse coding with learned dictionaries is exploited to meet stringent bandwidth constraint during time-critical operations, while a near-lossless representation is employed to support high-quality static frame rendering. A flexible high-speed GPU decoder and raycasting framework mixes and matches GPU kernels performing parallel object-space and image-space operations for seamless support, on fat and thin clients, of different exploration use cases, including animation and temporal browsing, dynamic exploration of single frames, and high-quality snapshots generated from near-lossless data. The quality and performance of our approach are demonstrated on large data sets with thousands of multi-billion-voxel frames.
IGM-Vis: Analyzing Intergalactic and Circumgalactic Medium Absorption Using Quasar Sightlines in a Cosmic Web Context
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Burchett, Joseph N.; Abramov, David; Otto, Jasmine Tan; Artanegara, Cassia; Prochaska, Jason Xavier; Forbes, Angus G.; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
We introduce IGM-Vis, a novel astrophysics visualization and data analysis application for investigating galaxies and the gas that surrounds them in context with their larger scale environment, the Cosmic Web. Environment is an important factor in the evolution of galaxies from actively forming stars to quiescent states with little, if any, discernible star formation activity. The gaseous halos of galaxies (the circumgalactic medium, or CGM) play a critical role in their evolution, because the gas necessary to fuel star formation and any gas expelled from widely observed galactic winds must encounter this interface region between galaxies and the intergalactic medium (IGM). We present a taxonomy of tasks typically employed in IGM/CGM studies informed by a survey of astrophysicists at various career levels, and demonstrate how these tasks are facilitated via the use of our visualization software. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of IGM-Vis through two in-depth use cases that depict real-world analysis sessions that use IGM/CGM data.
InsideInsights: Integrating Data-Driven Reporting in Collaborative Visual Analytics
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Mathisen, Andreas; Horak, Tom; Klokmose, Clemens Nylandsted; Grønbæk, Kaj; Elmqvist, Niklas; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Analyzing complex data is a non-linear process that alternates between identifying discrete facts and developing overall assessments and conclusions. In addition, data analysis rarely occurs in solitude; multiple collaborators can be engaged in the same analysis, or intermediate results can be reported to stakeholders. However, current data-driven communication tools are detached from the analysis process and promote linear stories that forego the hierarchical and branching nature of data analysis, which leads to either too much or too little detail in the final report. We propose a conceptual design for integrated data-driven reporting that allows for iterative structuring of insights into hierarchies linked to analytic provenance and chosen analysis views. The hierarchies become dynamic and interactive reports where collaborators can review and modify the analysis at a desired level of detail. Our web-based INSIDEINSIGHTS system provides interaction techniques to annotate states of analytic components, structure annotations, and link them to appropriate presentation views. We demonstrate the generality and usefulness of our system with two use cases and a qualitative expert review.
An Interactive Visualization System for Large Sets of Phase Space Trajectories
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Neuroth, Tyson; Sauer, Franz; Ma, Kwan-Liu; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
We introduce a visual analysis system with GPU acceleration techniques for large sets of trajectories from complex dynamical systems. The approach is based on an interactive Boolean combination of subsets into a Focus+Context phase-space visualization. We achieve high performance through efficient bitwise algorithms utilizing runtime generated GPU shaders and kernels. This enables a higher level of interactivity for visualizing the large multivariate trajectory data. We explain how our design meets a set of carefully considered analysis requirements, provide performance results, and demonstrate utility through case studies with many-particle simulation data from two application areas.
Interactive Volumetric Visual Analysis of Glycogen-derived Energy Absorption in Nanometric Brain Structures
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Agus, Marco; Calì, Corrado; Al-Awami, Ali K.; Gobbetti, Enrico; Magistretti, Pierre J.; Hadwiger, Markus; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Digital acquisition and processing techniques are changing the way neuroscience investigation is carried out. Emerging applications range from statistical analysis on image stacks to complex connectomics visual analysis tools targeted to develop and test hypotheses of brain development and activity. In this work, we focus on neuroenergetics, a field where neuroscientists analyze nanoscale brain morphology and relate energy consumption to glucose storage in form of glycogen granules. In order to facilitate the understanding of neuroenergetic mechanisms, we propose a novel customized pipeline for the visual analysis of nanometric-level reconstructions based on electron microscopy image data. Our framework supports analysis tasks by combining i) a scalable volume visualization architecture able to selectively render image stacks and corresponding labelled data, ii) a method for highlighting distance-based energy absorption probabilities in form of glow maps, and iii) a hybrid connectivitybased and absorption-based interactive layout representation able to support queries for selective analysis of areas of interest and potential activity within the segmented datasets. This working pipeline is currently used in a variety of studies in the neuroenergetics domain. Here, we discuss a test case in which the framework was successfully used by domain scientists for the analysis of aging effects on glycogen metabolism, extracting knowledge from a series of nanoscale brain stacks of rodents somatosensory cortex.
Investigating Effects of Visual Anchors on Decision-Making about Misinformation
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Wesslen, Ryan; Santhanam, Sashank; Karduni, Alireza; Cho, Isaac; Shaikh, Samira; Dou, Wenwen; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Cognitive biases are systematic errors in judgment due to an over-reliance on rule-of-thumb heuristics. Recent research suggests that cognitive biases, like numerical anchoring, transfers to visual analytics in the form of visual anchoring. However, it is unclear how visualization users can be visually anchored and how the anchors affect decision-making. To investigate, we performed a between-subjects laboratory experiment with 94 participants to analyze the effects of visual anchors and strategy cues using a visual analytics system. The decision-making task was to identify misinformation from Twitter news accounts. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions that modified the scenario video (visual anchor) and/or strategy cues provided. Our findings suggest that such interventions affect user activity, speed, confidence, and, under certain circumstances, accuracy. We discuss implications of our results on the forking paths problem and raise concerns on how visualization researchers train users to avoid unintentionally anchoring users and affecting the end result.
Investigating the Manual View Specification and Visualization by Demonstration Paradigms for Visualization Construction
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Saket, Bahador; Endert, Alex; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
Abstract Interactivity plays an important role in data visualization. Therefore, understanding how people create visualizations given different interaction paradigms provides empirical evidence to inform interaction design. We present a two-phase study comparing people's visualization construction processes using two visualization tools: one implementing the manual view specification paradigm (Polestar) and another implementing visualization by demonstration (VisExemplar). Findings of our study indicate that the choice of interaction paradigm influences the visualization construction in terms of: 1) the overall effectiveness, 2) how participants phrase their goals, and 3) their perceived control and engagement. Based on our findings, we discuss trade-offs and open challenges with these interaction paradigms.

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Browsing 38-Issue 3 by Subject "centered computing"

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