DevLan/vispubs huggingface dataset:
Expandable grids for visualizing and authoring computer security policies
Authors: Robert W. Reeder, Lujo Bauer, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Michael K. Reiter, Kelli Bacon, Keisha How, Heather Strong
Published at CHI, 2008

We introduce the Expandable Grid, a novel interaction technique for creating, editing, and viewing many types of security policies. Security policies, such as file permissions policies, have traditionally been displayed and edited in user interfaces based on a list of rules, each of which can only be viewed or edited in isolation. These list-of-rules interfaces cause problems for users when multiple rules interact, because the interfaces have no means of conveying the interactions amongst rules to users. Instead, users are left to figure out these rule interactions themselves. An Expandable Grid is an interactive matrix visualization designed to address the problems that list-of-rules interfaces have in conveying policies to users. This paper describes the Expandable Grid concept, shows a system using an Expandable Grid for setting file permissions in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, and gives results of a user study involving 36 participants in which the Expandable Grid approach vastly outperformed the native Windows XP file-permissions interface on a broad range of policy-authoring tasks.
Generalized selection via interactive query relaxation
Authors: Jeffrey Heer, Maneesh Agrawala, Wesley Willett
Published at CHI, 2008

Selection is a fundamental task in interactive applications, typically performed by clicking or lassoing items of interest. However, users may require more nuanced forms of selection. Selecting regions or attributes may be more important than selecting individual items. Selections may be over dynamic items and selections might be more easily created by relaxing simpler selections (e.g., "select all items like this one"). Creating such selections requires that interfaces model the declarative structure of the selection, not just individually selected items. We present direct manipulation techniques that couple declarative selection queries with a query relaxation engine that enables users to interactively generalize their selections. We apply our selection techniques in both information visualization and graphics editing applications, enabling generalized selection over both static and dynamic interface objects. A controlled study finds that users create more accurate selection queries when using our generalization techniques.
Handsaw: tangible exploration of volumetric data by direct cut-plane projection
Authors: Leonardo Bonanni, Jason Alonso, Neil Chao, Greg Vargas, Hiroshi Ishii 0001
Published at CHI, 2008

Tangible User Interfaces are well-suited to handling three-dimensional data sets by direct manipulation of real objects in space, but current interfaces can make it difficult to look inside dense volumes of information. This paper presents the Handsaw, a system that detects a virtual cut-plane projected by an outstretched hand or laser-line directly on an object or space and reveals sectional data on an adjacent display. By leaving the hands free and using a remote display, these techniques can be shared between multiple users and integrated into everyday practice. The Handsaw has been prototyped for scientific visualizations in medicine, engineering and urban design. User evaluations suggest that using a hand is more intuitive while projected light is more precise than keyboard and mouse control, and the Handsaw system has the potential to be used effectively by novices and in groups.
Integrating statistics and visualization: case studies of gaining clarity during exploratory data analysis
Authors: Adam Perer, Ben Shneiderman
Published at CHI, 2008

Although both statistical methods and visualizations have been used by network analysts, exploratory data analysis remains a challenge. We propose that a tight integration of these technologies in an interactive exploratory tool could dramatically speed insight development. To test the power of this integrated approach, we created a novel social network analysis tool, SocialAction, and conducted four long-term case studies with domain experts, each working on unique data sets with unique problems. The structured replicated case studies show that the integrated approach in SocialAction led to significant discoveries by a political analyst, a bibliometrician, a healthcare consultant, and a counter-terrorism researcher. Our contributions demonstrate that the tight integration of statistics and visualizations improves exploratory data analysis, and that our evaluation methodology for long-term case studies captures the research strategies of data analysts.
LiveRAC: interactive visual exploration of system management time-series data
Authors: Peter McLachlan, Tamara Munzner, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Stephen C. North
Published at CHI, 2008

We present LiveRAC, a visualization system that supports the analysis of large collections of system management time-series data consisting of hundreds of parameters across thousands of network devices. LiveRAC provides high information density using a reorderable matrix of charts, with semantic zooming adapting each chart's visual representation to the available space. LiveRAC allows side-by-side visual comparison of arbitrary groupings of devices and parameters at multiple levels of detail. A staged design and development process culminated in the deployment of LiveRAC in a production environment. We conducted an informal longitudinal evaluation of LiveRAC to better understand which proposed visualization techniques were most useful in the target environment.
LivOlay: interactive ad-hoc registration and overlapping of applications for collaborative visual exploration
Authors: Hao Jiang, Daniel Wigdor, Clifton Forlines, Michelle Borkin, Jens Kauffmann, Chia Shen
Published at CHI, 2008

The interoperability of disparate data types and sources has been a long standing problem and a hindering factor for the efficacy and efficiency in visual exploration applications. In this paper, we present a solution, called LivOlay, that enables the rapid visual overlay of live data rendered in different applications. Our tool addresses datasets in which visual registration of the information is necessary in order to allow for thorough understanding and visual analysis. We also discuss initial evaluation and user feedback of LivOlay.
Metrics for measuring human interaction with interactive visualizations for information analysis
Authors: Theresa A. O'Connell, Yee-Yin Choong
Published at CHI, 2008

There is a lack of widely-accepted metrics for evaluating analysts' experiences with interactive visualizations (IV) for information analysis. We report an approach for developing analyst-centered IV metrics that is built upon understanding the workplace needs and experiences of information analysts with respect to IVs. We derive metrics from human-computer interaction heuristics, specializing the metrics to address the characteristics of IVs and analysts. When there are no existing heuristics, analysts' needs and experiences inform new heuristics.
On the benefits of confidence visualization in speech recognition
Authors: Keith Vertanen, Per Ola Kristensson
Published at CHI, 2008

In a typical speech dictation interface, the recognizer's best-guess is displayed as normal, unannotated text. This ignores potentially useful information about the recognizer's confidence in its recognition hypothesis. Using a confidence measure (which itself may sometimes be inaccurate), we investigated providing visual feedback about low-confidence portions of the recognition using shaded, red underlining. An evaluation showed, compared to a baseline without underlining, underlining low-confidence areas did not increase user's speed or accuracy in detecting errors. However, we found that when recognition errors were correctly underlined, they were discovered significantly more often than baseline. Conversely, when errors failed to be underlined, they were discovered less often. Our results indicate confidence visualization can be effective --- but only if the confidence measure has high accuracy. Further, since our results show that users tend to trust confidence visualization, designers should be careful in its application if a high accuracy confidence measure is not available.
Rendering navigation and information space with honeycombTM
Authors: Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, Bill McDaniel
Published at CHI, 2008

The growing amount of available information poses challenges not only in the process of information retrieval. The usability of the rendered search process and results can be increased by appropriate visualization techniques or new interaction paradigms, or both. In this article we present the HoneyComb™ paradigm, an information visualization style that aims to render and manage large quantities of information items. We describe the design objectives and the prototype of HC™. Finally, we present a short evaluation of the HC™ paradigm in the context of search and browsing.
Sesame: informing user security decisions with system visualization
Authors: Jennifer Stoll, Craig S. Tashman, W. Keith Edwards, Kyle Spafford
Published at CHI, 2008

Non-expert users face a dilemma when making security decisions. Their security often cannot be fully automated for them, yet they generally lack both the motivation and technical knowledge to make informed security decisions on their own. To help users with this dilemma, we present a novel security user interface called Sesame. Sesame uses a concrete, spatial extension of the desktop metaphor to provide users with the security-related, visualized system-level information they need to make more informed decisions. It also provides users with actionable controls to affect a system's security state. Sesame graphically facilitates users' comprehension in making these decisions, and in doing so helps to lower the bar for motivating them to participate in the security of their system. In a controlled study, users with Sesame were found to make fewer errors than a control group which suggests that our novel security interface is a viable alternative approach to helping users with their dilemma.
Supporting the analytical reasoning process in information visualization
Authors: Yedendra Babu Shrinivasan, Jarke J. van Wijk
Published at CHI, 2008

This paper presents a new information visualization framework that supports the analytical reasoning process. It consists of three views - a data view, a knowledge view and a navigation view. The data view offers interactive information visualization tools. The knowledge view enables the analyst to record analysis artifacts such as findings, hypotheses and so on. The navigation view provides an overview of the exploration process by capturing the visualization states automatically. An analysis artifact recorded in the knowledge view can be linked to a visualization state in the navigation view. The analyst can revisit a visualization state from both the navigation and knowledge views to review the analysis and reuse it to look for alternate views. The whole analysis process can be saved along with the synthesized information. We present a user study and discuss the perceived usefulness of a prototype based on this framework that we have developed.
Wedge: clutter-free visualization of off-screen locations
Authors: Sean Gustafson, Patrick Baudisch, Carl Gutwin, Pourang Irani
Published at CHI, 2008

To overcome display limitations of small-screen devices, researchers have proposed techniques that point users to objects located off-screen. Arrow-based techniques such as City Lights convey only direction. Halo conveys direction and distance, but is susceptible to clutter resulting from overlapping halos. We present Wedge, a visualization technique that conveys direction and distance, yet avoids overlap and clutter. Wedge represents each off-screen location using an acute isosceles triangle: the tip coincides with the off-screen locations, and the two corners are located on-screen. A wedge conveys location awareness primarily by means of its two legs pointing towards the target. Wedges avoid overlap programmatically by repelling each other, causing them to rotate until overlap is resolved. As a result, wedges can be applied to numbers and configurations of targets that would lead to clutter if visualized using halos. We report on a user study comparing Wedge and Halo for three off-screen tasks. Participants were significantly more accurate when using Wedge than when using Halo.
Your place or mine?: visualization as a community component
Authors: Catalina M. Danis, Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jesse Kriss
Published at CHI, 2008

Many Eyes is a web site that provides collaborative visualization services, allowing users to upload data sets, visualize them, and comment on each other's visualizations. This paper describes a first interview-based study of Many Eyes users, which sheds light on user motivation for creating public visualizations. Users talked about data for many reasons, from scientific research to political advocacy to hobbies. One consistent theme across these different scenarios is the use of visualizations in communication and collaborative practices. Collaboration and conversation, however, often took place outside the site, leaving no traces on Many Eyes itself. In other words, despite spurring significant social activity, Many Eyes is not so much an online community as a "community component" which users insert into pre-existing online social systems.
A Flexible Multi-Volume Shader Framework for Arbitrarily Intersecting Multi-Resolution Datasets
Authors: John Plate, Thorsten Holtkämper, Bernd Fröhlich 0001
Published at Vis, 2007

We present a powerful framework for 3D-texture-based rendering of multiple arbitrarily intersecting volumetric datasets. Each volume is represented by a multi-resolution octree-based structure and we use out-of-core techniques to support extremely large volumes. Users define a set of convex polyhedral volume lenses, which may be associated with one or more volumetric datasets. The volumes or the lenses can be interactively moved around while the region inside each lens is rendered using interactively defined multi-volume shaders. Our rendering pipeline splits each lens into multiple convex regions such that each region is homogenous and contains a fixed number of volumes. Each such region is further split by the brick boundaries of the associated octree representations. The resulting puzzle of lens fragments is sorted in front-to-back or back-to-front order using a combination of a view-dependent octree traversal and a GPU-based depth peeling technique. Our current implementation uses slice-based volume rendering and allows interactive roaming through multiple intersecting multi-gigabyte volumes.
A Unified Paradigm For Scalable Multi-Projector Displays
Authors: Niranjan Damera-Venkata, Nelson L. Chang, Jeffrey M. DiCarlo
Published at Vis, 2007

We present a general framework for the modeling and optimization of scalable multi-projector displays. Based on this framework, we derive algorithms that can robustly optimize the visual quality of an arbitrary combination of projectors without manual adjustment. When the projectors are tiled, we show that our framework automatically produces blending maps that outperform state-of-the-art projector blending methods. When all the projectors are superimposed, the framework can produce high-resolution images beyond the Nyquist resolution limits of component projectors. When a combination of tiled and superimposed projectors are deployed, the same framework harnesses the best features of both tiled and superimposed multi-projector projection paradigms. The framework creates for the first time a new unified paradigm that is agnostic to a particular configuration of projectors yet robustly optimizes for the brightness, contrast, and resolution of that configuration. In addition, we demonstrate that our algorithms support high resolution video at real-time interactive frame rates achieved on commodity graphics platforms. This work allows for inexpensive, compelling, flexible, and robust large scale visualization systems to be built and deployed very efficiently.
An Effective Illustrative Visualization Framework Based on Photic Extremum Lines (PELs)
Authors: Xuexiang Xie, Ying He 0001, Feng Tian 0006, Seah Hock Soon, Xianfeng Gu, Hong Qin
Published at Vis, 2007

Conveying shape using feature lines is an important visualization tool in visual computing. The existing feature lines (e.g., ridges, valleys, silhouettes, suggestive contours, etc.) are solely determined by local geometry properties (e.g., normals and curvatures) as well as the view position. This paper is strongly inspired by the observation in human vision and perception that a sudden change in the luminance plays a critical role to faithfully represent and recover the 3D information. In particular, we adopt the edge detection techniques in image processing for 3D shape visualization and present photic extremum lines (PELs) which emphasize significant variations of illumination over 3D surfaces. Comparing with the existing feature lines, PELs are more flexible and offer users more freedom to achieve desirable visualization effects. In addition, the user can easily control the shape visualization by changing the light position, the number of light sources, and choosing various light models. We compare PELs with the existing approaches and demonstrate that PEL is a flexible and effective tool to illustrate 3D surface and volume for visual computing.
Conjoint Analysis to Measure the Perceived Quality in Volume Rendering
Authors: Joachim Giesen, Klaus Mueller 0001, Eva Schuberth, Lujin Wang, Peter Zolliker
Published at Vis, 2007

Visualization algorithms can have a large number of parameters, making the space of possible rendering results rather high-dimensional. Only a systematic analysis of the perceived quality can truly reveal the optimal setting for each such parameter. However, an exhaustive search in which all possible parameter permutations are presented to each user within a study group would be infeasible to conduct. Additional complications may result from possible parameter co-dependencies. Here, we will introduce an efficient user study design and analysis strategy that is geared to cope with this problem. The user feedback is fast and easy to obtain and does not require exhaustive parameter testing. To enable such a framework we have modified a preference measuring methodology, conjoint analysis, that originated in psychology and is now also widely used in market research. We demonstrate our framework by a study that measures the perceived quality in volume rendering within the context of large parameter spaces.
Construction of Simplified Boundary Surfaces from Serial-sectioned Metal Micrographs
Authors: Scott E. Dillard, John Bingert, Dan Thoma, Bernd Hamann
Published at Vis, 2007

We present a method for extracting boundary surfaces from segmented cross-section image data. We use a constrained Potts model to interpolate an arbitrary number of region boundaries between segmented images. This produces a segmented volume from which we extract a triangulated boundary surface using well-known marching tetrahedra methods. This surface contains staircase-like artifacts and an abundance of unnecessary triangles. We describe an approach that addresses these problems with a voxel-accurate simplification algorithm that reduces surface complexity by an order of magnitude. Our boundary interpolation and simplification methods are novel contributions to the study of surface extraction from segmented cross-sections. We have applied our method to construct polycrystal grain boundary surfaces from micrographs of a sample of the metal tantalum.
Contextualized Videos: Combining Videos with Environment Models to Support Situational Understanding
Authors: Yi Wang, David M. Krum, Enylton Machado Coelho, Doug A. Bowman
Published at Vis, 2007

Multiple spatially-related videos are increasingly used in security, communication, and other applications. Since it can be difficult to understand the spatial relationships between multiple videos in complex environments (e.g. to predict a person's path through a building), some visualization techniques, such as video texture projection, have been used to aid spatial understanding. In this paper, we identify and begin to characterize an overall class of visualization techniques that combine video with 3D spatial context. This set of techniques, which we call contextualized videos, forms a design palette which must be well understood so that designers can select and use appropriate techniques that address the requirements of particular spatial video tasks. In this paper, we first identify user tasks in video surveillance that are likely to benefit from contextualized videos and discuss the video, model, and navigation related dimensions of the contextualized video design space. We then describe our contextualized video testbed which allows us to explore this design space and compose various video visualizations for evaluation. Finally, we describe the results of our process to identify promising design patterns through user selection of visualization features from the design space, followed by user interviews.
Cores of Swirling Particle Motion in Unsteady Flows
Authors: Tino Weinkauf, Jan Sahner, Holger Theisel, Hans-Christian Hege
Published at Vis, 2007

In nature and in flow experiments particles form patterns of swirling motion in certain locations. Existing approaches identify these structures by considering the behavior of stream lines. However, in unsteady flows particle motion is described by path lines which generally gives different swirling patterns than stream lines. We introduce a novel mathematical characterization of swirling motion cores in unsteady flows by generalizing the approach of Sujudi/Haimes to path lines. The cores of swirling particle motion are lines sweeping over time, i.e., surfaces in the space-time domain. They occur at locations where three derived 4D vectors become coplanar. To extract them, we show how to re-formulate the problem using the parallel vectors operator. We apply our method to a number of unsteady flow fields.
CoViCAD: Comprehensive Visualization of Coronary Artery Disease
Authors: Maurice Termeer, Javier Oliván Bescós, Marcel Breeuwer, Anna Vilanova, Frans A. Gerritsen, M. Eduard Gröller
Published at Vis, 2007

We present novel, comprehensive visualization techniques for the diagnosis of patients with coronary artery disease using segmented cardiac MRI data. We extent an accepted medical visualization technique called the bull's eye plot by removing discontinuities, preserving the volumetric nature of the left ventricular wall and adding anatomical context. The resulting volumetric bull's eye plot can be used for the assessment of transmurality. We link these visualizations to a 3D view that presents viability information in a detailed anatomical context. We combine multiple MRI scans (whole heart anatomical data, late enhancement data) and multiple segmentations (polygonal heart model, late enhancement contours, coronary artery tree). By selectively combining different rendering techniques we obtain comprehensive yet intuitive visualizations of the various data sources.