Episode #184: IEEEVIS Recap

The annual IEEE Visualization Conference is an annual conference in scientific visualization, information visualization, and visual analytics. I’ve attended only a few times in the past, but with this year’s conference being virtual, it was an easier opportunity to present papers, learn about the state of data visualization research, and say hi to folks I haven’t seen in a while. When the conference concluded, I reached out to Robert Kosara from Tableau and Alvitta Ottley from Washington University to come chat about what they saw, what they learned, and what they thought about the virtual set up.

Dr. Alvitta Ottley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She is also the director of the Visual Data Analysis Group. Her research uses interdisciplinary approaches to solve problems such as how best to display information for effective decision-making and how to design human-in-the-loop visual analytics interfaces that are more attuned to the way people think. Dr. Ottley was the recipient of an NSF CRII Award in 2018 for using visualization to support medical decision-making. Her work has appeared in leading conferences and journals such as CHI, VIS, and TVCG.

Robert Kosara is research scientist at Tableau and has been part of the visualization community for more than 20 years. His research interests include data presentation and communication, as well as unusual or under-researched visualization techniques like connected scatterplots, ISOTYPE, and pie charts. He runs the eagereyes visualization blog and associated Youtube channel.

This is a special episode of the podcast! I’m breaking my every-other-week regular schedule to bring you this interview as close to the conference as I could get it! I hope you enjoy and can check out some of the papers we discussed.

Episode Notes

Robert Kosara (EagerEyes) | Twitter | YouTube

Alvitta Ottley | Twitter | Visual Data Analysis Group at Washington University

IEEEVIS Main Conference Website

VisComm Workshop

VisActivities Workshop

BELIV Workshop

Papers

-Jon Schwabish and Alice Feng, Applying Racial Equity Awareness in Data Visualization (summary blog post)

-Melanie Bancilhon, Zhengliang Liu, and Alvitta Ottley. Let’s Gamble: How a Poor Visualization Can Elicit Risky Behavior.  

-Sunwoo Ha, Adam Kern, Melanie Bancilhon, and Alvitta Ottley. Expectation Versus Reality: The Failed Evaluation of a Mixed-Initiative Visualization System.

-Shayan Monadjemi, Roman Garnett, and Alvitta Ottley. Competing Models: Inferring Exploration Patterns and Information Relevance via Bayesian Model Selection

-InfoVis Best Paper: Alex Kale, Matthew Kay, Jessica Hullman, Visual Reasoning Strategies for Effect Size Judgments and Decisions 

-Melanie Bancilhon, Zhengliang Liu, and Alvitta Ottley, Let’s Gamble: How a Poor Visualization Can Elicit Risky Behavior

-Cristina Ceja, Caitlyn McColeman, Cindy Xiong, Steven Franconeri, Truth or Square: Aspect Ratio Biases Recall of Position Encodings

Related Episodes

Episode #161: Drew Skau and Robert Kosara

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