I attended today the Prof. Ben Shneiderman lecture ‘The Thrill of Discovery: Information Visualisation for High-Dimensional Spaces’ at the Centre for HCI Design, City University of London.
Abstract (from http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/news/researchseminars.html)
“Interactive information visualisation provide researchers with remarkable tools for discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional spaces. They can begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration can provide 100msec updates even for million-record databases.
This talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, Ebay auction, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher ).
Our next step was to combine these key ideas to produce the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 that now includes the rank-by-feature framework (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce). By judiciously choosing from appropriate ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections, users can locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Demonstrations will be shown.”
The talk was great, it covered more than what was promised in the above abstract. One notable mention would be ManyEyes which brings a collaborative aspect within information visualisation.