visualization, analysis, and next-gen tech

Visualizing in the 4th Dimension

BrendanB — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:01:34 +0000

I’m only about a third of the way through these videos taking a mathematical approach to explaining the fourth dimension, but I had to post the link. The videos begin by explaining two dimensions, work through the third, and finish in the fourth. Pretty enlightening and entertaining stuff thus far. I’ll post some thoughts when I complete the series.

Text to Visualization

BrendanB — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:48:32 +0000

Yesterday, Tim Showers posted an interesting piece called “Visualization Strat egies: Text & Documents” which features numerous techniques for visualizing text from sources such as stump speeches, or literature, or simply a sentence. He explains visualizations that span the spectrum from Tag Clouds to Document Arc Diagrams.

One of my favorite visualizations Tim mentions is “literary organism maps“, from Stefanie Posavec which demonstrate the subject matter of each chapter in a given piece of literature “within a textual context”. Being an English major in college, this concept is extremely interesting to me. Visit her project website to see all her impressive visualizations.

Many Eyes

BrendanB — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:27:10 +0000

First, let me apologize for the lack of consistancy of postings. A few months ago, Dan and I committed to creating this blog, but have since done a poor job of keeping up with it. We recently agreed to make a conscious effort to maintain our schedules while still reaching out to our readers at least once a day. Communciation is important to us, and we need to make the effort to keep our end of the bargain. With that in mind:

I know it’s not new, but me being new to the “community”, I recently stumbled upon Many Eyes, part of IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group. The stated goal of the group is to “democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis”. Their approach seems to be one of an open community with discussion. With roots reaching as far back as 2003, there are numerous interesting ideas on the site regarding what information can be visualized and how to do so. They also have pages upon pages of visualizations, as well as 800+ pages of data sets.

Olympic Medal Count

BrendanB — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:58:06 +0000

There’s a interesting, albeit simple, tool on the New York Times website visualizing the Olympic metal count since 1896, the advent of the modern Olympic Games. Take a peak. It’s interesting to compare world events at different times and make a corrleation regarding how those events effected medal counts. For example, an obvious assumption is that the popularization of flight in the ’20s and ’30s, increased the number of countries participating, and in turn winning medals.

Data Visualization’s Applicability

BrendanB — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:24:47 +0000

Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has a whole series of visualization projects posted on his website, which at a minimum, are pretty cool. While I understand the use of data visualization coupled with Social Network Analysis, and Link Analysis, and can easily think of countless applications, these types of visualizations are often beyond me. They are certainly aesthetically pleasing, and I understand the explanation Chris provides:

“These visual comparisons allow us to see differences in how the two subjects are used – both where they are similar and diverge. For example, among the top 120 trigrams, ‘He’ and ‘She’ have many common second words. However, they differ on some interesting ones, for example, only ‘he’ connects to ‘argues’, while only ‘she’ connects to ‘love’ (within the top 120).”

However, I often find myself asking, how can I apply this to what I’m doing…whether it be life outside the office, or a specific project I’m involved with at work? Are these types of visualizations simply a way to demonstrate a technology’s “features” and capabilities; or is there an everyday use? I certainly hope there’s some applicability, because the technology, and more to the point, the resulting visualizations, never cease to impress me.

Data Visualization for the Web – Flare

BrendanB — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:57:39 +0000

On July 30, 2008, Flare was released in its newest version. For those of you unaware, much as I was, Flare is a piece of data visualization software created by the UC Berkeley Visualization Lab, used to create charts, graphs and interactive graphics. The visualizations created run in Flash. The Flare website contains some demos, sample applications, as well as a tutorial, and API documentation. Personally, I haven’t had much of an opportunity to determine what the software is capable of as of yet, but based on the demos alone, it’s something I’ll definitely be looking at.

Upcoming Data Visualization Events

BrendanB — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:26:24 +0000

On any given day, there are numerous data visualization and analysis events being held. Here’s a small list of just some events taking place in the coming months:

-Government Summit 2008 (September 4, 2008 , Reston VA)

-The Advanced Visualization and Data Analytics Technology Expo (September 16, 2008, Norfolk VA)

-IS&T/SPIE’s International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2009 / Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2009 (January 18 – 22, 2009, San Jose California)

If you know of others, please share the relavant information with us in the comments section.

The Algorithms of Hierarchical Networks

BrendanB — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:17:02 +0000

The Santa Fe Institute has conducted new research that shows the hierarchial structure of networks can be automatically exposed through the use of algorithms. One of the most interesting parts of this research theorizes that these algorithms are relevant to a massive variety of networks, ranging from biochemical to social. To see an interesting graphical depiction of this concept and an in depth analysis, visit Roland Piquepaille’s blog, courtesy of zdnet , and to read the paper, visit Nature.com ($$$).

NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization

BrendanB — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:48:30 +0000

Interesting stuff from NASA. http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Data Visualization Toolkits

danoviz — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:12:07 +0000

There are quite a few great platforms for developing visualization solutions. Here’s a quick roundup that includes basic highlights and decriptions from the respective websites and a synopsis of the delivery and development technologies supported.

Prefuse
www.prefuse.org

Prefuse is an extensible software framework for helping software developers create interactive information visualization applications using the Java programming language.

Highlights:

Data structures that support attributes, indexing and queries
Layout and animation components
Common controls for interactive interfaces
Transformations for panning and zooming
Dynamic queries
Physics engine
Multiple view displays
SQL-like expression language for queries
Standalone applications

Delivery:

Visual components
Web applets
Java framework
Swing
Applets

Processing
www.processing.org

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.

Highlights:

Dedicated, simple IDE
animation, drawing, interaction, motion, simulation, file i/o, cellular automata, fractals, and l-systems
3D and OpenGL
Hardware interfaces and integration with other Processing iniatives, like arduino
Easily approachable for non-programmers

Delivery:

Standalone applications
Web applets

VTK
http://public.kitware.com/VTK/

The Visualization ToolKit (VTK) is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization used by thousands of researchers and developers around the world.

Highlights:

Visualization algorithms including scalar, vector, tensor, texture, and volumetric methods; and advanced modeling techniques such as implicit modeling, polygon reduction, mesh smoothing, cutting, contouring, and Delaunay triangulation. In addition, dozens of imaging algorithms have been directly integrated to allow the user to mix 2D imaging / 3D graphics algorithms and data.

Delivery:

Standalone applications

Development Technologies:

C++ class library, and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python.

Piccolo
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/index.shtml

Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs, in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), in particular. A ZUI is a new kind of interface that presents a huge canvas of information on a traditional computer display by letting the user smoothly zoom in, to get more detailed information, and zoom out for an overview.

Highlights:

Piccolo provides support for developers of 2D (+ zooming) object-oriented graphics programs in Java and C#.
“scenegraph” model that is common to 3D environments. Basically, this means that Piccolo keeps a hierarchal structure of objects and cameras.
Each node in the hierarchy has a general 2D affine transform which allows every object to be arbitrarily translated, scaled, rotated, and sheared. In addition, the cameras have affine transforms that specify their view into the scene. Standalone applications

Delivery:

Visual components
Web applets

Development Technologies:

Piccolo.Java for Java
Piccolo.NET for .NET based on GDI+
PocketPiccolo.NET for mobile apps

Jung
http://jung.sourceforge.net/

Java Universal Network/Graph Framework–is a software library that provides a common and extendible language for the modeling, analysis, and visualization of data that can be represented as a graph or network. It is written in Java, which allows JUNG-based applications to make use of the extensive built-in capabilities of the Java API, as well as those of other existing third-party Java libraries.

Highlights:

JUNG includes implementations of a number of algorithms from graph theory, data mining, and social network analysis, such as routines for clustering, decomposition, optimization, random graph generation, statistical analysis, and calculation of network distances, flows, and importance measures (centrality, PageRank, HITS, etc.)
JUNG also provides a visualization framework that makes it easy to construct tools for the interactive exploration of network data. Users can use one of the layout algorithms provided, or use the framework to create their own custom layouts. In addition, filtering mechanisms are provided which allow users to focus their attention, or their algorithms, on specific portions of the graph.

Delivery:

Standalone applications
Visual components
Web applets

Development Technologies:

Java

InfoVis
http://ivtk.sourceforge.net/

The InfoVis Toolkit is a Interactive Graphics Toolkit written in Java to ease the development of Information Visualization applications and components.

Highlights:

Unified data structure: The base data structure is a table of columns. Columns contain objects of homogeneous types, such as integers or strings. Trees and Graphs are derived from Tables.
Unified set of interactive components” Interactive filtering (a.k.a. dynamic queries) can be performed with the same control objects and components regardless of the data structure, simplifying the reuse of existing components and the design of generic ones.
Fast: the InfoVis Toolkit can use accelerated graphics provided by Agile2D, an implementations of Java2D based on the OpenGL API for hardware accelerated graphics. On machine with hardware acceleration, some visualizations redisplay 100 times faster than with the standard Java2D implementation.
Extensible: the InfoVis Toolkit is meant to incorporate new information visualization techniques and is distributed with the full sources and with a very liberal licence. It could be a base for student projects, reseach projects or commercial products.

Delivery:

Standalone applications
Visual components
Web applets

Development Technologies:

Java

Did I miss your favorite? Send me a line and let me know.