Oxford-Purdue Visual Analytics Collaboration

April 15, 2019

About a decade ago, with funding from DHS, the UK started its first visual analytics program, UKVAC (UK Visual Analytics Centre), while Dr. Min Chen (a member of UKVAC) and VACCINE director Dr. David Ebert began their research collaboration. Since then, the Oxford team and the Purdue team have worked together on several projects, including video visualization and flight data visualization. At the 2014 VACCINE workshop on the Science of Evaluation at La Jolla, they first seriously considered the challenges in evaluating many visual analytics applications. Their experience in a wide range of practical applications of visual analytics has inspired them to seek a systematic approach to the design and evaluation of visual analytics workflows.

Their recent joint paper, entitled "An Ontological Framework for Supporting the Design and Evaluation of Visual Analytics Systems", outlines such a systematic approach. In this paper, for the first time, they relate the problem-solution space in visual analytics workflows to symptoms, causes, remedies, and side-effects in medicine. They describe an abstract reasoning methodology for analyzing the causal relationships among symptoms, causes, remedies, and side-effects in terms of the four primary components (statistics, algorithms, visualization, and interaction) in visual analytics workflows. The work represents a transformation from practice to theory, which will hopefully benefit many applications of visual analytics in the coming years.

This paper will be presented at EuroVis 2019, and will be published in Computer Graphics Forum, volume 38, issue 3. It is also supported by a web site: IVAS (Improving Visual Analytics Systems)