VizDeck + Visualization Recommenders

As research becomes increasingly data-intensive, scientists are relying on visualization very early in the data analysis cycle. We find that existing tools assume a “one-at-a-time” workflow for creating visualizations and impose a steep learning curve that makes it difficult to rapidly create and review visualizations. At the same time, scientists are becoming more cognitively overloaded, spending an increasing proportion of time on data “handling” tasks rather than scientific analysis. In response, we developed VizDeck, a web-based visual analytics tool for relational data that automatically recommends a set of appropriate visualizations based on the statistical properties of the data and adopts a card game metaphor to present the results to the user.

Our recent work has been through a collaboration with Jeff Heer’s group to develop Voyager and Voyager2, systems integrating visualization recommendation and conventional visualization specification. We’ve found that a hybrid interface delivers benefits beyond what either approach can do alone, allowing users to both explore the data broadly through recommendation and design specific visualizations to explore particular aspects of the data. The key architectural insight was to model the recommendation constraints as a query over a virtual space of possible visualizations.

Collaborators

  • Jeffrey Heer
  • Jock Mackinlay
  • Anushka Anand
  • Cecilia Aragon

Students

  • Kanit Wongsuphasawat
  • Dominik Moritz

Alumni

  • Daniel Perry
  • Alicia Key

Publications

  1. Voyager 2: Augmenting Visual Analysis with Partial View Specifications
    Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Zening Qu, Dominik Moritz, Riley Chang, Felix Ouk, Anushka Anand, Jock Mackinlay, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer.
    ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2017 
    @inproceedings{wongsuphasawat17voyager2,
  title = {Voyager 2: Augmenting Visual Analysis with Partial View Specifications},
  author = {Wongsuphasawat, Kanit and Qu, Zening and Moritz, Dominik and Chang, Riley and Ouk, Felix and Anand, Anushka and Mackinlay, Jock and Howe, Bill and Heer, Jeffrey},
  booktitle = {ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)},
  year = {2017},
  url = {http://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/voyager2}
}
  1. Towards A General-Purpose Query Language for Visualization Recommendation
    Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Dominik Moritz, Anushka Anand, Jock Mackinlay, Bill Howe, Jeffrey Heer.
    ACM SIGMOD Human-in-the-Loop Data Analysis (HILDA) 2016 
    @inproceedings{wongsuphasawat16compass,
  title = {Towards A General-Purpose Query Language for Visualization Recommendation},
  author = {Wongsuphasawat, Kanit and Moritz, Dominik and Anand, Anushka and Mackinlay, Jock and Howe, Bill and Heer, Jeffrey},
  booktitle = {ACM SIGMOD Human-in-the-Loop Data Analysis (HILDA)},
  year = {2016},
  url = {http://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/compassql}
}
    1. VizDeck: Streamlining exploratory visual analytics of scientific data
      Daniel B Perry, Bill Howe, Alicia MF Key, Cecilia Aragon.
      iConference 2013 
      @inproceedings{perry2013vizdeck,
  title = {VizDeck: Streamlining exploratory visual analytics of scientific data},
  author = {Perry, Daniel B and Howe, Bill and Key, Alicia MF and Aragon, Cecilia},
  year = {2013},
  booktitle = {iConference}
}
    2. Vizdeck: Self-organizing dashboards for visual analytics
      Alicia Key, Bill Howe, Daniel Perry, Cecilia Aragon.
      Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (demo) 2012 
      @inproceedings{key2012vizdeck,
  title = {Vizdeck: Self-organizing dashboards for visual analytics},
  author = {Key, Alicia and Howe, Bill and Perry, Daniel and Aragon, Cecilia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (demo)},
  pages = {681--684},
  year = {2012},
  organization = {ACM}
}
    3. VizDeck: A Card Game Metaphor for Fast Visual Data Exploration
      Bill Howe, Alicia Key, Daniel Perry, Cecilia Aragon.
      CHI ’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2012 
      @inproceedings{howe2012vizdeck,
  author = {Howe, Bill and Key, Alicia and Perry, Daniel and Aragon, Cecilia},
  title = {VizDeck: A Card Game Metaphor for Fast Visual Data Exploration},
  booktitle = {CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  series = {CHI EA '12},
  year = {2012},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-1016-1},
  location = {Austin, Texas, USA},
  pages = {1667--1672},
  numpages = {6},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2212776.2223690},
  doi = {10.1145/2212776.2223690},
  acmid = {2223690},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  keywords = {data understanding., interactive visualization, rapid prototyping, scientific data, visualization}
}
    4. Database-as-a-service for long-tail science
      Bill Howe, Garret Cole, Emad Souroush, Paraschos Koutris, Alicia Key, Nodira Khoussainova, Leilani Battle.
      Scientific and Statistical Database Management 2011 
      @inproceedings{howe2011database,
  title = {Database-as-a-service for long-tail science},
  author = {Howe, Bill and Cole, Garret and Souroush, Emad and Koutris, Paraschos and Key, Alicia and Khoussainova, Nodira and Battle, Leilani},
  booktitle = {Scientific and Statistical Database Management},
  pages = {480--489},
  year = {2011},
  organization = {Springer}
}
    1. Automatic example queries for ad hoc databases
      Bill Howe, Garrett Cole, Nodira Khoussainova, Leilani Battle.
      Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2011, Athens, Greece, June 12-16, 2011 2011 
      @inproceedings{howe2011example,
  author = {Howe, Bill and Cole, Garrett and Khoussainova, Nodira and Battle, Leilani},
  title = {Automatic example queries for ad hoc databases},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management
                 of Data, {SIGMOD} 2011, Athens, Greece, June 12-16, 2011},
  pages = {1319--1322},
  year = {2011},
  crossref = {DBLP:conf/sigmod/2011},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1989323.1989487},
  doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989487},
  timestamp = {Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:14:38 +0200},
  biburl = {http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bib/conf/sigmod/HoweCKB11},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, http://dblp.org}
}
    1. Database-as-a-service for long-tail science
      Bill Howe, Garret Cole, Emad Souroush, Paraschos Koutris, Alicia Key, Nodira Khoussainova, Leilani Battle.
      Scientific and Statistical Database Management 2011 
      @inproceedings{howe2011database,
  title = {Database-as-a-service for long-tail science},
  author = {Howe, Bill and Cole, Garret and Souroush, Emad and Koutris, Paraschos and Key, Alicia and Khoussainova, Nodira and Battle, Leilani},
  booktitle = {Scientific and Statistical Database Management},
  pages = {480--489},
  year = {2011},
  organization = {Springer}
}

    Sponsors

    This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and NSF IIS Award #1064505



    projects

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