our research

2012

  • A demo of Twitterscope based on Graphviz GvMap is online.
  • A paper on large-scale network visualization and multidimensional scaling by Approximate Low Rank Stress Majorization to be presented at Eurovis 2012. We're delighted that Marc Khoury, an intern in 2011, was a co-author.
  • Summer interns in the vis group for 2012 include Xiaotong Liu, Mehmet Adil Yalcin and Sohaib Ghani.
  • Carlos Scheidegger is on the PC for ICDM 2012, and giving an invited talk at Interface Symposia 2012 in May.
  • Jim Klosowski is on the PC for the International Symposium of Visual Computing (ISVC 2012) and the International Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization, and Computer Vision (WSCG 2012).
  • North is serving on the PC for IEEE Infovis, VizSec, and ED2012 at the Diagrams Symposium.
  • Yifan Hu will give a talk at NIST on "Visualizing Data with Graphs and Maps", May 7, 2012.
  • Yifan Hu visited Prof. Xiaoru Yuan at Beijing University and gave a talk "Visualizing Large Graphs and Clusters", Mar 5, 2012.
  • Yifan Hu presented a paper,  "A Maxent-Stress Model for Graph Layout", by Gansner, Hu & North at IEEE PacificVis2012, Feb 28-Mar 2, Songdou, Korea.

2011

  • Yifan Hu gave a talk at DIMACS on "Getting the Big Picture: Visualizing Large Graphs and Clusters", Oct 17.
  • Yifan Hu, who co-maintains the University of Florida Matrix Collection, recently has to layout graphs in the Collection that have billions of edges and hundreds of millions of nodes. At this scale, the first problem is that the usual 32-bit version sfdp simply can not store all the edges. A 64-bit version is able to layout such a graph (given a day or two), but rendering the layout became an issue. Writing out the graph in postscript took 100GB of disk space, and conversion to a bit-map based format using the usual tools failed. In the end he resorted to rending using OpenGL in a streaming fashion, and save to a bit-map format. The result is seen, for example, here.  The next challenge: how to interact with and make sense out of such a huge graph?
  • 600,000 views in StumbleUpon of Yifan Hu's Music Map! Interesting reactions to an Infovis technique from a broad, non-technical audience.
  • Accepted paper at ESA 2011: Approximating Minimum Manhattan Networks in Higher Dimensions by Aparna Das, Emden R. Gansner, Michael Kaufmann, Stephen Kobourov, Joachim Spoerhase, and Alexander Wolff.
  • Accepted paper at KDD 2011: Unsupervised Clustering of Multidimensional Distributions using Earth Mover Distance by David Applegate, Tamraparni Dasu, Shankar Krishnan and Simon Urbanek.
  • Marc Khoury and Nivan Ferreira are working with us as interns for the summer of 2011.
  • Yifan Hu attended PacificVis 2011 conference and presented two papers,  Multilevel Agglomerative Edge Bundling for Visualizing Large Graph and Visualizing Dynamic Data with Map.
  • A visualization of the tree of life by Yifan Hu was mentioned in Wired Science.
  • Yifan Hu created an interactive visualization of tweets about TED talks. It uses Graphviz GvMap. (Requires HTML5 canvas such as in Firefox or Safari; does not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer.)
  • Jim Klosowski and Shankar Krishnan presented Realtime Image Deconvolution on the GPU at SPIE 2011.

2010

About Us

Information Visualization Research contributes algorithms and systems for visually exploring and understanding large, complex data sets. We are particularly interested in problems that arise from scale, dimensionality, complexity of geometric representation, and opportunities for interaction and visual navigation. We place a priority on implementing our work in software components. We also experiment with applications and interfaces for wall-sized digital displays, which are increasingly important for collaboration and communication using visualization. We recently created a minilab for work in the integration of 3D graphics with realtime video, especially in multiple viewpoint camera setups, and video data mining.

Some current projects include methods for visualizing internet topology data; rendering clustered networks (such as media recommendations) as geographic maps; GPU programming for high performance computing and video processing; collaboration on a scalable focus+context approach to displaying and exploring large sets of time series; a software system that manages over 100,000 servers and routers with visual querying for data access and exploration.

Questions we work on

  • Can algorithms draw networks beautifully and understandably? How can we make this ability available to any application or web service?
  • Is it practical to visually explore huge networks? Can we browse them directly? Can we run queries on large networks to extract concise subgraphs that explain interesting relationships?
  • How can we visualize billions of transactions and other events? How should we engineer systems to provide near-instantaneous access to overviews, mid-level views, and individual items?
  • How can we extract accurate 3D models from live 2D video streams? What services can we create from that?
  • Can we use 3D graphics processors and clusters to improve the performance of large-scale data analysis and optimization algorithms?
  • Could we make it much easier to analyze large-scale data sets by combining the best of databases, statistical tools, and visualization in one system?

Members

  • Emden Gansner
  • Yifan Hu
  • James Klosowski
  • Eleftherios Koutsofios
  • Shankar Krishnan
  • Stephen North
  • Carlos Scheidegger