DSpace Repository :: Browsing by Author "Laramee, Robert S."

Browsing by Author "Laramee, Robert S."

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Cartograms with Topological Features
(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Tong, Chao; McNabb, Liam; Laramee, Robert S.; {Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck
Cartograms are a popular and useful technique for depicting geo-spatial data. Dorling style and rectangular cartograms are very good for facilitating comparisons between unit areas. Each unit area is represented by the same shape such as a circle or rectangle, and the uniformity in shapes facilitates comparative judgment. However, the layout of these more abstract shapes may also simultaneously reduce the map's legibility and increase error. When we integrate univariate data into a cartogram, the recognizability of cartogram may be reduced. There is a trade-off between information recognition and geo-information accuracy. This is the inspiration behind the work we present. We attempt to increase the map's recognizability and reduce error by introducing topological features into the cartographic map. Our goal is to include topological features such as a river in a Dorling-style or rectangular cartogram to make the visual layout more recognizable, increase map cognition and reduce geospatial error. We believe that compared to the standard Dorling and rectangular style cartogram, adding topological features provides familiar geo-spatial cues and flexibility to enhance the recognizability of a cartogram.
A Constructivism-based Approach to Treemap Literacy in the Classroom
(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Firat, Elif E.; Lang, Colm; Srinivas, Bhumika; Peng, Ilena; Laramee, Robert S.; Joshi, Alark; Magana, Alejandra; Zara, Jiri
Treemaps are a popular representation to show hierarchical as well as part-to-whole relationships in data. While most students are aware of node-link representations / network diagrams based on their K-12 education, treemaps are often a novel representation to them. We present our experience of developing a software using principles from constructivism to help students understand treemaps using linked, side-by-side views of a node-link diagram and a treemap of the same data. Based on the qualitative survey conducted at the end of the intervention, students found the linked views to be beneficial for understanding hierarchical representation of data using treemaps.
EuroVis 2019 CGF 38-3 STARs: Frontmatter
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Laramee, Robert S.; Oeltze, Steffen; Sedlmair, Michael; Laramee, Robert S. and Oeltze, Steffen and Sedlmair, Michael
Evaluating Bloom's Taxonomy-based Learning Modules for Parallel Coordinates Literacy
(The Eurographics Association, 2022) Peng, Ilena; Firat, Elif E.; Laramee, Robert S.; Joshi, Alark; Bourdin, Jean-Jacques; Paquette, Eric
In this paper, we present the results of an intervention designed to introduce parallel coordinates to students. The intervention contains six new modules inspired by Bloom's taxonomy that featured a combination of videos, tests, and tasks. We studied the impact of our modules with a corrective feedback mechanism inspired by Mastery Learning. Based on analyzing the data of our students, we found that students in the Corrective Immediate Feedback (CIF) group performed better on average on all the modules as compared to the students in the No Feedback (NF) group. In the tasks where students were required to construct parallel coordinates plots, students in the Corrective Immediate Feedback group produced plots with appropriate use of color, labels, legends, etc. Overall, students in both groups grew more confident in their ability to recognize parallel coordinates plots and expressed high confidence in their ability to interpret, create, and use parallel coordinates plots for data exploration and presentation in the future.
GPU-Assisted Scatterplots for Millions of Call Events
(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Rees, Dylan; Roberts, Richard C.; Laramee, Robert S.; Brookes, Paul; D'Cruze, Tony; Smith, Gary A.; {Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck
With four percent of the working population employed in call centers in both the United States and the UK, the contact center industry represents a sizable proportion of modern industrial landscapes. As with most modern industries, data collection is de rigueur, producing gigabytes of call records that require analysis. The scatterplot is a well established and understood form of data visualization dating back to the 17th century. In this paper we present an application for visualizing large call centre data sets using hardware-accelerated scatterplots. The application utilizes a commodity graphics card to enable visualization of a month's worth of data, enabling fast filtering of multiple attributes. Filtering is implemented using the Open Computing Language (OpenCL), providing significant performance improvement over traditional methods. We demonstrate the value of our application for exploration and analysis of millions of call events from a real-world industry partner. Domain expert feedback from our industrial partners is reported.
How to Write a Visualization Survey Paper: A Starting Point
(The Eurographics Association, 2019) McNabb, Liam; Laramee, Robert S.; Tarini, Marco and Galin, Eric
This paper attempts to explain the mechanics of writing a survey paper in data visualization or visual analytics. It serves as a useful starting point for those who have never written a survey paper or have very little experience. A literature review or survey paper is often considered the starting point of a PhD candidate's scientific degree. However, there are no dedicated papers that focus on guidelines for the planning or writing of a survey paper or literature review in visualization or visual analytics. We provide guidelines and our recommendations for a foundational structure on which to build a survey paper, whilst also considering intermediate goals, and offer helpful advice to improve the survey process and literature analysis. The result is a useful starting point for those wishing to write a survey paper or state-of-the-art (STAR) review in visualization or visual analytics. The guidelines and recommendations we make can also be generalized to other areas of computing and science. An abstract is a required feature of a survey paper and should identity the topic of the literature review. A good abstract addresses why the given topic is interesting and why it is helpful. A good abstract features the following elements: (1) topic introduction, (2) the motivation, (3) the goal of the review, and the benefits the review provides to the reader. A good literature survey offers a helpful classification of the literature, mature areas of research, and open, unsolved problems in visualization or visual analytics.
Hybrid Visualization of Protein-Lipid and Protein-Protein Interaction
(The Eurographics Association, 2019) Alharbi, Naif; Krone, Michael; Chavent, Matthieu; Laramee, Robert S.; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
In the Molecular Dynamics (MD) visualization literature, different approaches are utilized to study protein-lipid interactions (PLI) and protein-protein interaction (PPI) in decoupled contexts. However, the two types of interaction occur in the same space-time domain. It is beneficial to study the PLI and PPI in a unified context. Nevertheless, the simulation's size, length, and complexity increase the challenge of understanding the dynamic behavior. We propose a novel framework consisting of four linked views, a time-dependent 3D view, a novel hybrid view, a clustering timeline, and a details-on-demand window. We introduce a selection of visual designs to convey the behavior of PLI and PPI through a unified coordinate system. Abstraction is used to present proteins in hybrid 2D space, a projected tiled space is used to present both PLI and PPI at the particle level in a heat-map style visual design while glyphs are used to represent PPI at the molecular level. We couple visually separable visual designs in a unified coordinate space. The result lets the user study both PLI and PPI separately or together in a unified visual analysis framework. We also exemplify its use with case studies focusing on protein clustering and we report domain expert feedback.
MoneyVis: Open Bank Transaction Data for Visualization and Beyond
(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Firat, Elif E.; Vytla, Dharmateja; Singh, Navya Vasudeva; Jiang, Zhuoqun; Laramee, Robert S.; Hoellt, Thomas; Aigner, Wolfgang; Wang, Bei
With the rapid evolution of financial technology (FinTech) the importance of analyzing financial transactions is growing in importance. As the prevalence and number of financial transactions grow, so does the necessity of visual analysis tools to study the behavior represented by these transactions. However, real bank transaction data is generally private for security and confidentiality reasons, thus preventing its use for visual analysis and research. We present MoneyData, an anonymized open bank data set spanning seven years worth of transactions for research and analysis purposes. To our knowledge, this is the first real-world retail bank transaction data that has been anonymized and made public for visualization and analysis by other researchers. We describe the data set, its characteristics, and the anonymization process and present some preliminary analysis and images as a starting point for future research. The transactions are also categorized to facilitate understanding. We believe the availability of this open data will greatly benefit the research community and facilitate further study of finance.
Physics‐based Pathline Clustering and Exploration
(© 2021 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2021) Nguyen, Duong B.; Zhang, Lei; Laramee, Robert S.; Thompson, David; Monico, Rodolfo Ostilla; Chen, Guoning; Benes, Bedrich and Hauser, Helwig
Most existing unsteady flow visualization techniques concentrate on the depiction of geometric patterns in flow, assuming the geometry information provides sufficient representation of the underlying physical characteristics, which is not always the case. To address this challenge, this work proposes to analyse the time‐dependent characteristics of the physical attributes measured along pathlines which can be represented as a series of time activity curves (TAC). We demonstrate that the temporal trends of these TACs can convey the relation between pathlines and certain well‐known flow features (e.g. vortices and shearing layers), which enables us to select pathlines that can effectively represent the physical characteristics of interest and their temporal behaviour in the unsteady flow. Inspired by this observation, a new TAC‐based unsteady flow visualization and analysis framework is proposed. The centre of this framework is a new similarity measure that compares the similarity of two TACs, from which a new spatio‐temporal, hierarchical clustering that classifies pathlines based on their physical attributes, and a TAC‐based pathline exploration and selection strategy are proposed. A visual analytic system incorporating the TAC‐based pathline clustering and exploration is developed, which also provides new visualizations to support the user exploration of unsteady flow using TACs. This visual analytic system is applied to a number of unsteady flow in 2D and 3D to demonstrate its utility. The new system successfully reveals the detailed structure of vortices, the relation between shear layer and vortex formation, and vortex breakdown, which are difficult to convey with conventional methods.
RiverState: A Visual Metaphor Representing Millions of Time-Oriented State Transitions
(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Roberts, Richard C.; Rees, Dylan; Laramee, Robert S.; Brookes, Paul; Smith, Gary A.; {Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck
Developing a positive relationship between a business and its customers is vital to success. The outcome of any customer interaction can determine future patronage of the business. Many industry's only point of interaction with their customers is through a contact centre where everything from sales to complaints are handled. This places tremendous importance on the operational efficiency of the contact centre and the level of care provided to the customers. These customer interactions are recorded and archived in large databases, but undertaking insightful analysis is challenging due to both the size and complexity of the data. We present a visual solution to the tracking of customer interactions at a large scale. RiverState visualises the collective flow of callers through the process of interacting with a contact centre using a river metaphor. We use finite state transition machines with customised edges to depict millions of events and the states callers go through to complete their journey. We implement a range of novel features to enhance the analytical qualities of the application, and collect feedback from domain experts to analyse and evaluate the use of the software.
SoS TextVis: A Survey of Surveys on Text Visualization
(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Alharbi, Mohammad; Laramee, Robert S.; {Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck
Text visualization is a rapidly growing sub-field of information visualization and visual analytics. There are many approaches and techniques introduced every year to address a wide range of tasks and enable researchers from different disciplines to obtain leading-edge knowledge from digitized collections. This can be challenging particularly when the data is massive. Additionally, the sources of digital text have spread substantially in the last decades in various forms, such as web pages, blogs, twitter, email, electronic publications, and books. In response to the explosion of text visualization research literature, the first survey article was published in 2010. Furthermore, there are a growing number of surveys that review existing techniques and classify them based on text research methodology. In this work, we aim to present the first Survey of Surveys (SoS) that review all of the survey and state-of-the-art papers on text visualization techniques and provide an SoS classification. We study and compare the surveys, and categorize them into 5 groups: (1) document-centered, (2) user task analysis, (3) cross-disciplinary, (4) multifaceted, and (5) satellite-themed. We provide survey recommendations for researchers in the field of text visualization. The result is a very unique, valuable starting point and overview of the current state-of-the-art in text visualization research literature.
Spectrum: A C++ Header Library for Colour Map Management
(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Roberts, Richard C.; McNabb, Liam; AlHarbi, Naif; Laramee, Robert S.; {Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck
The use of colour mapping is fundamental to visualisation research. It acts as an additional layer beyond rendering in the spatial dimensions and provides a link between values in any dataset. When designing and building visualisation research software, the process of creating and managing a colour mapping system can be time-consuming and complex. Existing alternatives offer niche features and require complex dependencies or installations. We present Spectrum; an open source colour map management library that is developer friendly with no installation required, and that offers a wide variety of features for the majority of use cases. We demonstrate the utility of the library through simple snippets of code and a number of examples which illustrate its ease of use and functionality, as well as a video demonstrating the installation and use of the library in under two minutes. It is a very valuable jump-start tool for developers and researchers who need to focus on other tasks.
Towards a Survey of Interactive Visualization for Education
(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Fırat, Elif E.; Laramee, Robert S.; {Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck
Graphic design and visualization are becoming fundamental components of education. The use of advanced visual design in pedagogy is growing and evolving rapidly. One of their aims is to enhance the educational process by facilitating better understanding of the subject with the use of graphical representation methods. Research papers in this field offer important opportunities to examine previously completed experiments and extract useful educational outcomes. This paper analyzes and classifies pedagogical visualization research papers to increase understanding in this area. To our knowledge, this is the first (work-in-progress) survey paper on advanced visualization for education. We categorize related research papers into original subject groups that enable researchers to compare related literature. Our novel classification enables researchers to find both mature and unexplored directions which can inform directions for future work. This paper serves as a valuable resource for both beginners and experienced researchers who are interested in interactive visualization for education.
Treemap Literacy: A Classroom-Based Investigation
(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Firat, Elif E.; Denisova, Alena; Laramee, Robert S.; Romero, Mario and Sousa Santos, Beatrice
Visualization literacy, the ability to interpret and understand visual designs, has gained momentum in the educational and information visualization communities. The goal of this research is to identify and address barriers to treemap literacy - a popular visual design, with a view to improve a non-expert user's treemap visualization literacy skills. In this paper we present the results of two years of an information visualization assignment, which are used to identify the barriers to and challenges of understanding and creating treemaps. From this, we develop a treemap visualization literacy test. Then, we propose a pedagogical tool that facilitates both teaching and learning of treemaps and advances treemap visualization literacy. To investigate the efficiency of this educational software, we then conduct a classroom-based study with 25 participants. We identify the properties of treemaps that can hinder literacy and cognition based on the results from the treemap visualization literacy test. Results also provide further support for the use of our tool that had a positive effect on treemap literacy skills of university students.
When Size Matters: Towards Evaluating Perceivability of Choropleths
(The Eurographics Association, 2018) McNabb, Liam; Laramee, Robert S.; Wilson, Max; {Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck
Choropleth maps are an invaluable visualization type for mapping geo-spatial data. One advantage to a choropleth map over other geospatial visualizations such as cartograms is the familiarity of a non-distorted landmass. However, this causes challenges when an area becomes too small in order to accurately perceive the underlying color. When does size matter in a choropleth map? We conduct an experiment to verify the relationship between choropleth maps, their underlying color map, and a user's perceivability. We do this by testing a user's perception of color relative to an administrative area's size within a choropleth map, as well as user-preference of fixed-locale maps with enforced minimum areas. Based on this initial experiment we can make the first recommendations with respect to a unit area's minimum size in order to be perceivably useful.

Browsing by Author "Laramee, Robert S."

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