DevLan/vispubs huggingface dataset:
Galex: Exploring the Evolution and Intersection of Disciplines
Authors: Zeyu Li 0003, Changhong Zhang, Shichao Jia, Jiawan Zhang
Published at VAST, 2019

Revealing the evolution of science and the intersections among its sub-fields is extremely important to understand the characteristics of disciplines, discover new topics, and predict the future. The current work focuses on either building the skeleton of science, lacking interaction, detailed exploration and interpretation or on the lower topic level, missing high-level macro-perspective. To fill this gap, we design and implement Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex), a hierarchical visual analysis system, in combination with advanced text mining technologies, that could help analysts to comprehend the evolution and intersection of one discipline rapidly. We divide Galex into three progressively fine-grained levels: discipline, area, and institution levels. The combination of interactions enables analysts to explore an arbitrary piece of history and an arbitrary part of the knowledge space of one discipline. Using a flexible spotlight component, analysts could freely select and quickly understand an exploration region. A tree metaphor allows analysts to perceive the expansion, decline, and intersection of topics intuitively. A synchronous spotlight interaction aids in comparing research contents among institutions easily. Three cases demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.
GPGPU Linear Complexity t-SNE Optimization
Authors: Nicola Pezzotti, Julian Thijssen, Alexander Mordvintsev, Thomas Höllt, Baldur van Lew, Boudewijn P. F. Lelieveldt, Elmar Eisemann, Anna Vilanova
Published at VAST, 2019

In recent years the t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) algorithm has become one of the most used and insightful techniques for exploratory data analysis of high-dimensional data. It reveals clusters of high-dimensional data points at different scales while only requiring minimal tuning of its parameters. However, the computational complexity of the algorithm limits its application to relatively small datasets. To address this problem, several evolutions of t-SNE have been developed in recent years, mainly focusing on the scalability of the similarity computations between data points. However, these contributions are insufficient to achieve interactive rates when visualizing the evolution of the t-SNE embedding for large datasets. In this work, we present a novel approach to the minimization of the t-SNE objective function that heavily relies on graphics hardware and has linear computational complexity. Our technique decreases the computational cost of running t-SNE on datasets by orders of magnitude and retains or improves on the accuracy of past approximated techniques. We propose to approximate the repulsive forces between data points by splatting kernel textures for each data point. This approximation allows us to reformulate the t-SNE minimization problem as a series of tensor operations that can be efficiently executed on the graphics card. An efficient implementation of our technique is integrated and available for use in the widely used Google TensorFlow.js, and an open-source C++ library.
GUIRO: User-Guided Matrix Reordering
Authors: Michael Behrisch 0001, Tobias Schreck, Hanspeter Pfister
Published at VAST, 2019

Matrix representations are one of the main established and empirically proven to be effective visualization techniques for relational (or network) data. However, matrices—similar to node-link diagrams—are most effective if their layout reveals the underlying data topology. Given the many developed algorithms, a practical problem arises: “Which matrix reordering algorithm should I choose for my dataset at hand?” To make matters worse, different reordering algorithms applied to the same dataset may let significantly different visual matrix patterns emerge. This leads to the question of trustworthiness and explainability of these fully automated, often heuristic, black-box processes. We present GUIRO, a Visual Analytics system that helps novices, network analysts, and algorithm designers to open the black-box. Users can investigate the usefulness and expressiveness of 70 accessible matrix reordering algorithms. For network analysts, we introduce a novel model space representation and two interaction techniques for a user-guided reordering of rows or columns, and especially groups thereof (submatrix reordering). These novel techniques contribute to the understanding of the global and local dataset topology. We support algorithm designers by giving them access to 16 reordering quality metrics and visual exploration means for comparing reordering implementations on a row/column permutation level. We evaluated GUIRO in a guided explorative user study with 12 subjects, a case study demonstrating its usefulness in a real-world scenario, and through an expert study gathering feedback on our design decisions. We found that our proposed methods help even inexperienced users to understand matrix patterns and allow a user-guided steering of reordering algorithms. GUIRO helps to increase the transparency of matrix reordering algorithms, thus helping a broad range of users to get a better insight into the complex reordering process, in turn supporting data and reordering algorithm insights.
ICE: An Interactive Configuration Explorer for High Dimensional Categorical Parameter Spaces
Authors: Anjul Tyagi, Zhen Cao, Tyler Estro, Erez Zadok, Klaus Mueller 0001
Published at VAST, 2019

There are many applications where users seek to explore the impact of the settings of several categorical variables with respect to one dependent numerical variable. For example, a computer systems analyst might want to study how the type of file system or storage device affects system performance. A usual choice is the method of Parallel Sets designed to visualize multivariate categorical variables, However, we found that the magnitude of the parameter impacts on the numerical variable cannot be easily observed here. We also attempted a dimension reduction approach based on Multiple Correspondence Analysis but found that the SVD-generated 2D layout resulted in a loss of information. We hence propose a novel approach, the Interactive Configuration Explorer (ICE), which directly addresses the need of analysts to learn how the dependent numerical variable is affected by the parameter settings given multiple optimization objectives. No information is lost as ICE shows the complete distribution and statistics of the dependent variable in context with each categorical variable. Analysts can interactively filter the variables to optimize for certain goals such as achieving a system with maximum performance, low variance, etc. Our system was developed in tight collaboration with a group of systems performance researchers and its final effectiveness was evaluated with expert interviews, a comparative user study, and two case studies.
Influence Flowers of Academic Entities
Authors: Minjeong Shin, Alexander Soen, Benjamin T. Readshaw, Steve Blackburn, Mitchell Whitelaw, Lexing Xie
Published at VAST, 2019

We present the Influence Flower, a new visual metaphor for the influence profile of academic entities, including people, projects, institutions, conferences, and journals. While many tools quantify influence, we aim to expose the flow of influence between entities. The Influence Flower is an ego-centric graph, with a query entity placed in the centre. The petals are styled to reflect the strength of influence to and from other entities of the same or different type. For example, one can break down the incoming and outgoing influences of a research lab by research topics. The Influence Flower uses a recent snapshot of Microsoft Academic Graph, consisting of 212 million authors, their 176 million publications, and 1.2 billion citations. An interactive web app, Influence Map, is constructed around this central metaphor for searching and curating visualisations. We also propose a visual comparison method that highlights change in influence patterns over time. We demonstrate through several case studies that the Influence Flower supports data-driven inquiries about the following: researchers' careers over time; paper(s) and projects, including those with delayed recognition; the interdisciplinary profile of a research institution; and the shifting topical trends in conferences. We also use this tool on influence data beyond academic citations, by contrasting the academic and Twitter activities of a researcher.
Interactive Correction of Mislabeled Training Data
Authors: Shouxing Xiang, Xi Ye, Jiazhi Xia, Jing Wu 0004, Yang Chen, Shixia Liu
Published at VAST, 2019

In this paper, we develop a visual analysis method for interactively improving the quality of labeled data, which is essential to the success of supervised and semi-supervised learning. The quality improvement is achieved through the use of user-selected trusted items. We employ a bi-level optimization model to accurately match the labels of the trusted items and to minimize the training loss. Based on this model, a scalable data correction algorithm is developed to handle tens of thousands of labeled data efficiently. The selection of the trusted items is facilitated by an incremental tSNE with improved computational efficiency and layout stability to ensure a smooth transition between different levels. We evaluated our method on real-world datasets through quantitative evaluation and case studies, and the results were generally favorable.
Interactive Learning for Identifying Relevant Tweets to Support Real-time Situational Awareness
Authors: Luke S. Snyder, Yi-Shan Lin, Morteza Karimzadeh, Dan Goldwasser, David S. Ebert
Published at VAST, 2019

Various domain users are increasingly leveraging real-time social media data to gain rapid situational awareness. However, due to the high noise in the deluge of data, effectively determining semantically relevant information can be difficult, further complicated by the changing definition of relevancy by each end user for different events. The majority of existing methods for short text relevance classification fail to incorporate users' knowledge into the classification process. Existing methods that incorporate interactive user feedback focus on historical datasets. Therefore, classifiers cannot be interactively retrained for specific events or user-dependent needs in real-time. This limits real-time situational awareness, as streaming data that is incorrectly classified cannot be corrected immediately, permitting the possibility for important incoming data to be incorrectly classified as well. We present a novel interactive learning framework to improve the classification process in which the user iteratively corrects the relevancy of tweets in real-time to train the classification model on-the-fly for immediate predictive improvements. We computationally evaluate our classification model adapted to learn at interactive rates. Our results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning models. In addition, we integrate our framework with the extended Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit (SMART) 2.0 system, allowing the use of our interactive learning framework within a visual analytics system tailored for real-time situational awareness. To demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, we provide domain expert feedback from first responders who used the extended SMART 2.0 system.
LightGuider: Guiding Interactive Lighting Design using Suggestions, Provenance, and Quality Visualization
Authors: Andreas Walch, Michael Schwärzler, Christian Luksch, Elmar Eisemann, Theresia Gschwandtner
Published at VAST, 2019

LightGuider is a novel guidance-based approach to interactive lighting design, which typically consists of interleaved 3D modeling operations and light transport simulations. Rather than having designers use a trial-and-error approach to match their illumination constraints and aesthetic goals, LightGuider supports the process by simulating potential next modeling steps that can deliver the most significant improvements. LightGuider takes predefined quality criteria and the current focus of the designer into account to visualize suggestions for lighting-design improvements via a specialized provenance tree. This provenance tree integrates snapshot visualizations of how well a design meets the given quality criteria weighted by the designer's preferences. This integration facilitates the analysis of quality improvements over the course of a modeling workflow as well as the comparison of alternative design solutions. We evaluate our approach with three lighting designers to illustrate its usefulness.
MetricsVis: A Visual Analytics System for Evaluating Employee Performance in Public Safety Agencies
Authors: Jieqiong Zhao, Morteza Karimzadeh, Luke S. Snyder, Chittayong Surakitbanharn, Cheryl Z. Qian, David S. Ebert
Published at VAST, 2019

Evaluating employee performance in organizations with varying workloads and tasks is challenging. Specifically, it is important to understand how quantitative measurements of employee achievements relate to supervisor expectations, what the main drivers of good performance are, and how to combine these complex and flexible performance evaluation metrics into an accurate portrayal of organizational performance in order to identify shortcomings and improve overall productivity. To facilitate this process, we summarize common organizational performance analyses into four visual exploration task categories. Additionally, we develop MetricsVis, a visual analytics system composed of multiple coordinated views to support the dynamic evaluation and comparison of individual, team, and organizational performance in public safety organizations. MetricsVis provides four primary visual components to expedite performance evaluation: (1) a priority adjustment view to support direct manipulation on evaluation metrics; (2) a reorderable performance matrix to demonstrate the details of individual employees; (3) a group performance view that highlights aggregate performance and individual contributions for each group; and (4) a projection view illustrating employees with similar specialties to facilitate shift assignments and training. We demonstrate the usability of our framework with two case studies from medium-sized law enforcement agencies and highlight its broader applicability to other domains.
Motion Browser: Visualizing and Understanding Complex Upper Limb Movement Under Obstetrical Brachial Plexus Injuries
Authors: Gromit Yeuk-Yin Chan, Luis Gustavo Nonato, Alice Chu, Preeti Raghavan, Viswanath Aluru, Cláudio T. Silva
Published at VAST, 2019

The brachial plexus is a complex network of peripheral nerves that enables sensing from and control of the movements of the arms and hand. Nowadays, the coordination between the muscles to generate simple movements is still not well understood, hindering the knowledge of how to best treat patients with this type of peripheral nerve injury. To acquire enough information for medical data analysis, physicians conduct motion analysis assessments with patients to produce a rich dataset of electromyographic signals from multiple muscles recorded with joint movements during real-world tasks. However, tools for the analysis and visualization of the data in a succinct and interpretable manner are currently not available. Without the ability to integrate, compare, and compute multiple data sources in one platform, physicians can only compute simple statistical values to describe patient's behavior vaguely, which limits the possibility to answer clinical questions and generate hypotheses for research. To address this challenge, we have developed Motion Browser, an interactive visual analytics system which provides an efficient framework to extract and compare muscle activity patterns from the patient's limbs and coordinated views to help users analyze muscle signals, motion data, and video information to address different tasks. The system was developed as a result of a collaborative endeavor between computer scientists and orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation physicians. We present case studies showing physicians can utilize the information displayed to understand how individuals coordinate their muscles to initiate appropriate treatment and generate new hypotheses for future research.
NNVA: Neural Network Assisted Visual Analysis of Yeast Cell Polarization Simulation
Authors: Subhashis Hazarika, Haoyu Li, Ko-Chih Wang, Han-Wei Shen, Ching-Shan Chou
Published at VAST, 2019

Complex computational models are often designed to simulate real-world physical phenomena in many scientific disciplines. However, these simulation models tend to be computationally very expensive and involve a large number of simulation input parameters, which need to be analyzed and properly calibrated before the models can be applied for real scientific studies. We propose a visual analysis system to facilitate interactive exploratory analysis of high-dimensional input parameter space for a complex yeast cell polarization simulation. The proposed system can assist the computational biologists, who designed the simulation model, to visually calibrate the input parameters by modifying the parameter values and immediately visualizing the predicted simulation outcome without having the need to run the original expensive simulation for every instance. Our proposed visual analysis system is driven by a trained neural network-based surrogate model as the backend analysis framework. In this work, we demonstrate the advantage of using neural networks as surrogate models for visual analysis by incorporating some of the recent advances in the field of uncertainty quantification, interpretability and explainability of neural network-based models. We utilize the trained network to perform interactive parameter sensitivity analysis of the original simulation as well as recommend optimal parameter configurations using the activation maximization framework of neural networks. We also facilitate detail analysis of the trained network to extract useful insights about the simulation model, learned by the network, during the training process. We performed two case studies, and discovered multiple new parameter configurations, which can trigger high cell polarization results in the original simulation model. We evaluated our results by comparing with the original simulation model outcomes as well as the findings from previous parameter analysis performed by our experts.
OD Morphing: Balancing Simplicity with Faithfulness for OD Bundling
Authors: Yan Lyu, Xu Liu 0014, Hanyi Chen, Arpan Mangal, Kai Liu 0001, Chao Chen 0004, Brian Y. Lim
Published at VAST, 2019

OD bundling is a promising method to identify key origin-destination (OD) patterns, but the bundling can mislead the interpretation of actual trajectories traveled. We present OD Morphing, an interactive OD bundling technique that improves geographical faithfulness to actual trajectories while preserving visual simplicity for OD patterns. OD Morphing iteratively identifies critical waypoints from the actual trajectory network with a min-cut algorithm and transitions OD bundles to pass through the identified waypoints with a smooth morphing method. Furthermore, we extend OD Morphing to support bundling at interaction speeds to enable users to interactively transition between degrees of faithfulness to aid sensemaking. We introduce metrics for faithfulness and simplicity to evaluate their trade-off achieved by OD morphed bundling. We demonstrate OD Morphing on real-world city-scale taxi trajectory and USA domestic planned flight datasets.
Origraph: Interactive Network Wrangling
Authors: Alex Bigelow, Carolina Nobre, Miriah D. Meyer, Alexander Lex
Published at VAST, 2019

Networks are a natural way of thinking about many datasets. The data on which a network is based, however, is rarely collected in a form that suits the analysis process, making it necessary to create and reshape networks. Data wrangling is widely acknowledged to be a critical part of the data analysis pipeline, yet interactive network wrangling has received little attention in the visualization research community. In this paper, we discuss a set of operations that are important for wrangling network datasets and introduce a visual data wrangling tool, Origraph, that enables analysts to apply these operations to their datasets. Key operations include creating a network from source data such as tables, reshaping a network by introducing new node or edge classes, filtering nodes or edges, and deriving new node or edge attributes. Our tool, Origraph, enables analysts to execute these operations with little to no programming, and to immediately visualize the results. Origraph provides views to investigate the network model, a sample of the network, and node and edge attributes. In addition, we introduce interfaces designed to aid analysts in specifying arguments for sensible network wrangling operations. We demonstrate the usefulness of Origraph in two Use Cases: first, we investigate gender bias in the film industry, and then the influence of money on the political support for the war in Yemen.
PlanningVis: A Visual Analytics Approach to Production Planning in Smart Factories
Authors: Dong Sun 0001, Renfei Huang, Yuanzhe Chen, Yong Wang 0021, Jia Zeng, Mingxuan Yuan, Ting-Chuen Pong, Huamin Qu
Published at VAST, 2019

Production planning in the manufacturing industry is crucial for fully utilizing factory resources (e.g., machines, raw materials and workers) and reducing costs. With the advent of industry 4.0, plenty of data recording the status of factory resources have been collected and further involved in production planning, which brings an unprecedented opportunity to understand, evaluate and adjust complex production plans through a data-driven approach. However, developing a systematic analytics approach for production planning is challenging due to the large volume of production data, the complex dependency between products, and unexpected changes in the market and the plant. Previous studies only provide summarized results and fail to show details for comparative analysis of production plans. Besides, the rapid adjustment to the plan in the case of an unanticipated incident is also not supported. In this paper, we propose PlanningVis, a visual analytics system to support the exploration and comparison of production plans with three levels of details: a plan overview presenting the overall difference between plans, a product view visualizing various properties of individual products, and a production detail view displaying the product dependency and the daily production details in related factories. By integrating an automatic planning algorithm with interactive visual explorations, PlanningVis can facilitate the efficient optimization of daily production planning as well as support a quick response to unanticipated incidents in manufacturing. Two case studies with real-world data and carefully designed interviews with domain experts demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of PlanningVis.