News

VACLab @ IEEE VIS 2017

The IEEE VIS conference will take place in Phoenix in just over a week. VACLab research will be represented at IEEE VIS in a number of ways. Two IEEE TVCG papers will be presented as part of IEEE VAST, both the result of collaborative work with other universities. These include: * **RCLens: Interactive Rare Category Exploration and Identification** Authors: Hanfei Lin, Siyuan Gao, David Gotz, Fan Du, Jingrui He, and Nan Cao * EventThread: Visual Summarization and Stage Analysis of Event Sequence Data Authors: Shunan Guo, Ke Xu, Rongwen Zhao, David Gotz, Hongyuan Zha, and Nan Cao

New Article in the International Journal of Health Planning and Management

We’ve recently published a new article focused on research gaps in routine health information system design barriers to data quality and use in low- and middle-income countries. The article has been published in the International Journal of Health Planning and Management, and is now available “online first” from journal’s website. Lead by CHIP PhD student Manish Kumar, also of the UNC MEASURE Program, the article presents the results of a literature review and argues for adopting an increased focus on systems thinking during health information system design.

ACM Computing Reviews honors our work as a "Best of Computing" article for 2016

ACM Computing Reviews publishes an annual list of “Notable Items” from the field of computing as part of a feature that it calls the “Best Of Computing.” recently released its 21st annual Notable listing, which honored just 231 books and papers selected from across the full breadth of computer science. I’m happy to share that our 2016 ACM Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) paper, which was honored with the IUI Best Paper award, was named one of the 231 items named in the 2016 Notable list.

New NSF Grant to Combat Bias in Visual Analytics

I’m excited to announced that I’ve secured a 4 year $1M+ grant from NSF for a new 4-year research initiative. In this project, my team will designing, develop, and evaluate a set of Contextual Visualization Methods for exploratory data analysis which are designed to support the discovery of more robust and generalizable insights from high-dimensional data. More specifically, this project is exploring new techniques for detecting, communicating, and reducing the impact of selection bias and other threats to validity which can arise during interactive visualization-based data analysis.

New IEEE TVCG Article on Rare Category Visualization

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) just published a paper I wrote collaboratively with a number of colleagues on Rare Category Visualization. The paper is now available online and will appear eventually in a print issue of the journal. Here is the abstract from the paper: Rare category identification is an important task in many application domains, ranging from network security, to financial fraud detection, to personalized medicine.

VACLab's Rashnil Chaturvedi named an INFORMS Student Competition finalist

Congratulations to VACLab member Rashnil Chaturvedi who is part of the UNC team that was recently named a Finalist for the 2017 INFORMS O.R. & Analytics Student Team Competition. To quote the competition website, “Eight student teams from around the world have been selected as finalists in the inaugural INFORMS O.R. and Analytics Student Team Competition. INFORMS, the leading international association for professionals in operations research and analytics, introduced this new competition to highlight young talent and provide O.

Our New Article in Information Visualization Describes Z-Glyphs

The journal Information Visualization has made our new article “Z-Glyph: Visualizing outliers in multivariate data” available online as of February 14, 2017. You can download the paper from the Sage website by following this link. The paper describes work done in collaboration with Nan Cao (Tongji University), Yu-Ru Lin (University of Pittsburgh), and Fan Du (University of Maryland). The full citation for this new article is at the bottom of this page.

Two New Articles in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Special Issue

I recently served as a Guest Editor for a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia focused on Visual Analytics in Multimedia (Volume 18, Issue 11, 2016). The issue was published at the end of the year and included several exciting papers on a broad range of topics. To frame the issue, my co-editors and I authored an editorial titled “Visual Analytics in Multimedia—Opportunities and Research Challenges. In addition, we co-authored a survey article describing the state of the art in visual analytics of social media data.

Two papers to appear at AMIA Visual Analytics in Healthcare Workshop 2016

Next month I’ll be attending the 2016 AMIA Annual Symposium in Chicago. AMIA will be host this year to the 2016 Visual Analytics in Healthcare Workshop. This year’s workshop will be the 7th annual workshop, and will mark a return to AMIA after IEEE VIS hosted last year’s event. I am a co-author for two papers at this year’s workshop. First, I am lead author on a progress report from the AMIA VIS Working Group’s Task Force on Evaluation.

Paper to appear at IEEE VIS 2016 Workshop on Temporal & Sequential Event Analysis

My paper titled “Soft Patterns: Moving Beyond Explicit Sequential Patterns During Visual Analysis of Longitudinal Event Datasets” has been accepted as part of the IEEE VIS 2016 Workshop on Temporal & Sequential Event Analysis. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the main IEEE VIS conference in Baltimore, Maryland. VIS runs from October 23-26, and the workshop takes place on Monday October 24. All papers accepted to the workshop should appear on the event’s website in advance of the actual workshop.