Visualization
We believe that the future of user interfaces is in the direction of larger, information-abundant displays. With such designs, the worrisome flood of information can be turned into a productive river of knowledge. Our experience during the past eight years has been that visual query formulation and visual display of results can be combined with the successful strategies of direct manipulation. Human perceptual skills are are quite remarkable and largely underutilized in current information and computing systems. Based on this insight, we developed dynamic queries, starfield displays, treemaps, treebrowsers, zoomable user interfaces, and a variety of widgets to present, search, browse, filter, and compare rich information spaces.
There are many visual alternatives but the basic principle for browsing and searching might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand. In several projects we rediscovered this principle and therefore wrote it down and highlighted it as a continuing reminder. If we can design systems with effective visual displays, direct manipulation interfaces, and dynamic queries then users will be able to responsibly and confidently take on even more ambitious tasks.
Current Projects
Community Analysis and Visualization
Nation of Neighbors is Neighborhood Watch for the 21st century. It facilitates real-time collaboration within communities and between community members and Law Enforcement. Their mission is to enable Citizens and Law Enforcement to work together to fight and deter crime and improve our communities.
Conference Monitor
Conference Monitor (CM) is a real time webbased tweet visualization dashboard to monitor the backchannel conversation during academic conferences.
Emily Dickinson's Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry
This XML-based archive brings together seventy-four poems and letters from Emily Dickinson’s correspondence with her sister-in-law and primary confidante, Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript. These images have zoom functionality as well as a special light-box feature that allows users to view and compare constellations of related documents. Users may search by date, genre, manuscript features, and full text. Dating from the 1850s to the end of Dickinson’s life, the work collected here shows all the characteristics of the poet’s mature art.
Evaluation of Visual Analytics
The NSF funded SEMVAST project (Scientific Evaluation Methods for Visual Analytics Science and Technology) aims to provide benchmark data sets with ground truth, develop corresponding metrics and automated tools for evaluation, and to seed an infrastructure for the coordination of long term evaluation activities.
EventFlow
The HCIL's ongoing work with temporal event records has produced powerful tools for analyzing patterns of point-based events (LifeLines2, LifeFlow). However, users found that point-based events limited their capacity to solve problems that had inherently interval attributes. To address this issue, EventFlow extends its predecessors to support both point-based and interval-based events. With EventFlow, we present novel solutions for displaying interval events, simplifying their visual impact, and incorporating them into meaningful queries.
LifeFlow
Event sequence analysis is an important task in many domains. In most cases they deal with more than thousands of records. While previous research has focused on searching and browsing, overview tasks are often overlooked. LifeFlow provides a novel, interactive visual overview of event sequences, scales to any number of records, summarizes all possible sequences, and highlights the temporal spacing of the events within sequences.
Lifelines2
Exploring temporal patterns in categorical data. We focus on Electronic Health Records and helping users find potential cause and effects phenomena in databases of patient records
ManyNets: Visualize Many Networks Simultaneously
ManyNets is a network visualization tool with tabular interface designed to
visualize up to several thousand network overviews at once. This
allows networks to be compared, and large networks to be explored
using a divide-and-conquer approach.
Similan: Finding Similar Records from Temporal Categorical Data
Similan is a temporal categorical data analysis tool that helps users find similar records from temporal categorical data. By implementing similarity metric computation and adopting ideas from rank-by-feature framework to rank records by similarity, Similan provides an interactive interface to customize and visualize similarity search results.
User Interface and Visualization for Electronic Health Records: SharpC at Maryland
The University of Maryland is participating in the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare (NCCD). This program seeks to support improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of health care through advanced information technology. NCCD's research focus area is Patient-Centered Cognitive Suport.
Past Projects
Biodiversity Information Visualization (TaxonTree, DoubleTree, EcoLens, LepTree)
Interfaces for online biodiversity and ecological databases, featuring incremental tree and graph browsing, in-context search results, coupled views, and readable labels.
Bioinformatics Visualization
We developed information visualization tools for gene expression data analysis, including mosaics, hierarchical clustering, parallel coordinates, treemaps, and scattergrams.
BRQLayer
BRQLayer is a photo viewer that generates Bi-level Radial Quantum (BRQ) layouts, which consist of a primary region surrounded by secondary regions. The thumbnails resize and the regions shift around dynamically as the layout is resized.
Business Network Monitoring Visualization
Several small projects relevant to Network Management (satellite network, business network).
Categorized Search Results
Users can view and organize web search results using meaningful and stable hierarchies. This can help speed discovery, especially for exploratory searchs.
CateRank: Interactive Exploration of Multivariate Categorical Data
CateRank aids in the categorical data exploration by providing useful visualizations and rankings for individual variables as well as the pairs of variables.
CounterPoint: A Zooming Presentation Tool
A plugin for PowerPoint that enables zoomable and hierarchical presentations.
DateLens: A Scalable Calendar Interface
An interactive fisheye calendar for Pocket PC and Outlook on the desktop that couples compact overviews, user control over the visible time period, and integrated search.
Digital Docket
Our work aims to develop interfaces to help scholars in the humanities and social sciences explore large text collections. We focus on the use of a combination of content and meta data to visualize the collection and support exploration.
Dynamaps and Census Data User Interfaces
Dynamap is an interface designed to facilitate easier viewing and dynamic query sliders for analysis of map-related census data.
Dynamic Query Interfaces for the EOSDIS Information System
How to help earth scientists find the data they need.
Elastic Windows for Rapid Multiple Window Management
Windows are organized in a hierarchical fashion on a space-filling tiled layout to support multiple window operations which enable fast task-switching and display reorganization.
EmailViz: Email Archive Visualization
A range of projects focused on visualizing archived email of individuals, and the organizational and social spaces to which they belong.
Excentric Labeling for Information Visualization
Excentric labeling dynamically labels a set of objects located around the cursor.
Fisheye Menus for Selection from Long Menus
A dynamic interactive menu that enables rapid selection from within large menus without scrolling.
Generalized Query Previews
Query previews form a simple and effective method to eliminate most of the zero-hit and mega-hit queries and help users prune data efficiently. Generalized query previews supply distribution information on data attributes and give continuous feedback about the result size.
Govstat Project
Integration of data and interfaces to enhance human understanding of government statistics.
Hierarchical Clustering Explorer
The Hierarchical Clustering Explorer began by supporting interactive exploration of clusters shown in dendrograms. It expanded to included the powerful rank-by-feature framework to support systematic discovery in high-dimensional multi-variate data.
Highway Traffic Management
Summary of several projects conducted in cooperation with the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology.
Interactive Information Visualization of a Million Items
New algorithms and interaction techniques to adapt popular information visualization representations for displaying one million of items.
Learning Historian
The Learning Historian record the history of user interaction with a simulation and allows this history to be replayed for review, sent with a message, used in a tutorial, or replayed as a series of variants to facilitate comparisons and explorations.
Lifelines for Juvenile Justice (Original)
LifeLines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories.
LifeLines for Visualizing Patient Records
LifeLines is a zoomable one screen overview of a patient record.
Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates
Network analysts may benefit from meaningful and stable layouts for
nodes in 1-5 defined regions. Then users control link visibility to
reduce clutter and see patterns of relationships. Our major application
has been citations among U.S. Supreme, Circuit and District Court cases.
PatternFinder
Searching Categorical Histories with PatternFinder:
Query Support for Electronic Health Records
PhotoCropr
Application that can be used to explore croppings of images using either the "Rule of Thirds" or the "Golden Spiral" composition rules.
PhotoFinder
Sustained effort to develop personal photo library browsing tools, including the patented drag-and-drop annotation tool with search capabilities.
PhotoMesa Zoomable Image Browser
A tool to support management of images through annotation, search, and a zoomable user interface to access thousands of images.
Role Management
A proposed fourth generation user-centered design emphasizing users’ roles, colleagues, and tasks rather than documents.
RouteLens
Helps users record the history of their common trips and review summary information to find patterns and compare alternative routes.
Simulated Processes in a Learning Environment (SimPLE)
An application framework for creating simulation-based learning environments.
Snap-Together Visualization
Information visualizations with multiple coordinated views enable users to rapidly explore complex data and discover relationships. SNAP is a software tool for creating coordinated views.
Social Action
SocialAction is a social network visualization that provides analysts systematic and flexible techniques for exploration.
Sonification of Maps
Color coded maps (choropleth maps) are often used to present information such as unemployment rates for each state. An auditory version (sonification) of such maps benefit blind users by providing an interactive sonic map.
SpaceTree: Browsing Node Link Diagrams
An interactive tree browser that builds on the conventional node link diagram approach by adding carefully designed layouts, animations, and iconic subtree representations coupled with integrated search.
TimeSearcher for Time-Series Data
TimeSearcher 1 and 2 provide powerful search capabilities for numerical (integer or real) time series with equally spaced time points. Appropriate for gene expresssion, financial, weather, and many other time-varying data series. Users specify queries with innovative graphical timeboxes and pattern matching widgets
Treemap
Treemap 4 provides information visualization tools for hierarchical data using a novel space filling approach. There are now dozens of commercial and freeware versions of treempas, and our research tools remain available for educational purposes.
TreePlus: Visualizing Graphs as Trees
TreePlus is an interactive graph visualization system that transforms graphs into trees and shows the missing graph structure with visualization and interaction techniques.
Visualizing Legal Information (Dotfire, GRIDL)
Working on legal information gave us a chance to test emerging ideas of visual displays for digital libraries. These working demonstrations expanded on the Spotfire ideas of dynamic queries, and added a grid interface to organize data by categorical attributes.
WebTOC: A Tool to Visualize and Quantify Web Sites
The table of contents of a website with indication of the amount and type of information behind each branch of the hierarchy.
Zoomable User Interfaces (Pad++)
Our original toolkit for Zoomable User Interfaces. Replaced with Piccolo.
Zoomable User Interfaces (Piccolo)
A Java & C# toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) in particular.
