Analytics Science and Technology Conference 2012 (VAST ... issued a general call for review volunteers. .... North-East Visualization and Analytics Center.
Preface Message from the Paper Chairs and Guest Editors These are the proceedings of the IEEE Scientific Visualization Conference 2012 (SciVis 2012) and the IEEE Information Visualization Conference 2012 (InfoVis 2012), held together at IEEE VisWeek from 14–19 October 2012 in Seattle, Washington, USA. For the first time, the proceedings also include ten papers from the co-located IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology Conference 2012 (VAST 2012). Visualization continues to develop as a research discipline in parallel with a growing body of practical design know-how. Visualization methods now produce effective imagery, increasingly interactive, for exploration, analysis, understanding, and communication in virtually every domain of human knowledge. The three conferences continue to be leading annual events for researchers and practitioners to share the most innovative and impactful results of an increasingly diverse and influential community. Historical acceptance rates for the conferences can be found at: http:// vgtc.org/about-us/conferences/currently-sponsored-events.
Review process The three conferences continued to follow a partially integrated review process. The process began with selection of each conference’s program committee of experts. We then issued a general call for review volunteers. All reviewers were asked to read and agree to our ethics guidelines. Submitted papers were assigned to program committee members by matching paper topics to the areas of expertise of committee members. To facilitate matching, committee members were invited to express preferences for the submitted papers based on viewing the abstracts. Careful effort was made at all levels of reviewing to identify potential conflicts of interests and to quarantine them from decision-making. Reviewing was undertaken through a two-stage procedure. In the first review cycle, each paper was reviewed by at least four reviewers. Two international program committee members acted as the primary and secondary reviewers. Each primary and secondary reviewer appointed an external (tertiary) reviewer and prepared a review themselves. In order to adhere to the journal’s standards, authors had the option of submitting their manuscript anonymously for a double-blind review. In that case, authors’ names and affiliations were known only to the primary and secondary reviewers. After all reviews had been completed and individual recommendation scores had been made, the primary reviewer led a short discussion phase among all reviewers and was responsible for writing a summary review and making a recommendation based upon the consensus. As papers chairs, we facilitated this process; considered the reviews, the discussion between all reviewers, and any confidential comments made; and considered the recommendation of the primary and secondary reviewers in conjuncx
tion with the scores and the expertise levels of the reviewers. We then collectively finalized the decisions of the first review cycle. Decisions were based on the detailed reviewer’s comments and recommendations, rather than on numerical scores alone. To inform conditional acceptance decisions, we consulted primary reviewers as needed in cases in which consensus was not achieved or in which the recommendation was uncertain or borderline. Conditionally accepted papers then underwent a second review cycle, in which authors were given a concrete list of improvements to make. Authors were also required to provide a cover letter describing how they addressed the reviewers’ comments and on the changes that they decided to incorporate. In the second review cycle, the primary reviewer judged whether the authors satisfactorily addressed the issues raised by the reviewers in the first review cycle, and provided a corresponding final recommendation. Authors were able to clarify aspects through anonymous email with the primary reviewer. Having multiple stages of reviewing had a significant impact on improving the quality of papers. Papers that contained noteworthy results but required more work than could be accommodated in the tight conference revision schedule were rejected, but offered a fast track through the regular IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Compuer Graphics (TVCG) journal review process. In this case, the results of the first round review served as the result of the first TVCG review cycle. Out of all conference submissions, only one IEEE InfoVis paper was offered this possibility. Numerous individuals have contributed their generous time and energy to making the IEEE VisWeek 2012 and this special issue a success. We would like to thank the authors of all submitted papers, the members of the IEEE SciVis, InfoVis, and VAST Program Committees, and all the other reviewers for their many hours of hard work.
IEEE SciVis 2012 The IEEE Scientific Visualization Conference 2012 papers program, contained in this special issue, accepted 42 papers describing state-of-the art tools, techniques and technology in the field of visualization. They were selected from 154 submissions by an international program committee of 64 members and supported by 635 reviews from 290 experts. The acceptance rate for IEEE SciVis 2012 is 27.2%. The use of paper categories - technique papers, system papers, design studies, evaluation papers, and model papers - is used with different intensity by our community. Technique papers (with 97 of the submissions) are the strongest suit in our community, followed by design study papers (with 41 of the submissions). System papers (with 9 of the submissions), evaluation papers (with 4 of the submissions), and
model papers (with 3 of the submissions) are still a smaller, but highly relevant, subset of the submissions. The community still builds upon strong ties to a broad variety of applications, from physical sciences, geo sciences, and engineering to life sciences. On the technical side, volume rendering, topological methods, and field visualization continue to drive the field forward. This is accompanied by a high interest in interactive analysis while evaluation has become an invaluable part of the field. A newer trend is a strong interest in the handling and visualization of very large volume data sets.
IEEE InfoVis 2012 IEEE InfoVis 2012 is the 18th annual IEEE InfoVis meeting and our sixth year as the IEEE Information Visualization Conference. IEEE InfoVis remains the primary meeting in the field of information visualization. Information visualization seeks to provide perceptually facile and cognitively useful spatial representations of data sets that are not inherently spatial, supplementing these representations with techniques to interact with the data intuitively. This year’s IEEE InfoVis Conference received 178 submissions, an increase of six over last year. Algorithm/technique and application/ design study papers formed the majority of those—75 and 51 submissions, respectively—with papers categorized as evaluation (22), theory (16), and systems (14) contributing the rest. From the initial set of submissions, 44 papers were given a conditional acceptance. All 44 of the conditionally accepted papers were finally accepted to appear at the conference. One additional paper was recommended for fast track through the regular TVCG journal review process. The overall acceptance rate was 25%, nominally lower than last year. Five of the finally accepted papers were nominated for the best paper award. The Best Paper Committee consists of three members chosen by the IEEE InfoVis Papers Cochairs, in consultation with the IEEE InfoVis Conference Chair and Steering Committee: Sheelagh Carpendale, Martin Wattenberg, and Leland Wilkinson. The committee made its selection from five papers shortlisted by the Papers Chairs. These were amongst the highest rated papers as determined by the reviewers and were considered by the Papers Chairs to have made a particularly significant contribution to the discipline of Information Visualization. (Note that IEEE VisWeek policy specifies that neither the IEEE InfoVis Conference Chair nor Papers Chairs are eligible to receive a Best Paper Award or be given Honorable Mention.) This year the selected best paper is “How Capacity Limits of Attention Influence Information Visualization Effectiveness,” by Steve Haroz and David Whitney. The Best Paper award recognizes this paper as an example of outstanding work that will stimulate further discussion and motivate new directions in the field. There are also three honorable mentions selected by the Best Paper Committee for excellent contributions: “Assessing the Effect of Visualizations on Bayesian Reasoning Through
Crowdsourcing,” by Luana Micallef, Pierre Dragicevic, and Jean-Daniel Fekete; “Design Study Methodology: Reflections from the Trenches and the Stacks,” by Michael Sedlmair, Miriah Meyer, and Tamara Munzner; and “Visual Semiotics & Uncertainty Visualization: An Empirical Study,” by Alan M. MacEachren, Robert E. Roth, James O’Brien, Bonan Li, Derek Swingley, and Mark Gahegan.
IEEE VAST 2012 The IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Conference continues to develop and grow. Each year brings new researchers to the field and produces important advances in the theory and practice of visual analytics. IEEE VAST is now in its seventh year, and it is the third year as an IEEE Conference. The presented work demonstrates significant growth and maturation of the visual analytics community. We received 104 submissions and were able to accept 30 papers into the program. For the first time, 10 IEEE VAST papers will be included in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) special issue for the IEEE VisWeek Proceedings, joining the papers from the IEEE Scientific Visualization and Information Visualization Conferences. These papers were selected by the IEEE VAST 2012 Papers Chairs based on their reviewer scores and an assessment of their overall contribution to the field. The rest of the accepted papers appear in the IEEE VAST Conference Proceedings. The best paper for 2012 was chosen by an Award Selection committee consisting of Pak Wong, Daniel Keim, and Brian Fisher, who reviewed the top papers and their peer reviews. We congratulate Gennady Andrienko, Natalia Andrienko, Michael Burch, and Daniel Weiskopf for their paper “Visual Analytics Methodology for Eye Movement Studies.” The paper presents an interesting new application domain for visual analytics that may help steer significant future research. The committee also selected two honorable mentions, noted in the table of contents of the IEEE VAST Conference Proceedings.
Acknowledgments As always, the papers chairs are indebted to the Publications team, especially the Publications & Project Coordinator, Meghan Haley, for coordinating schedules, collecting materials, and producing these beautiful conference proceedings. Furthermore, we thank Daniel Acevedo-Feliz for all his efforts and prompt edits to the conference website. Once again, the IEEE SciVis, InfoVis, and VAST Paper Chairs made use of the PCS review system. We wish to acknowledge James Stewart for his outstanding and timely support. We warmly thank the IEEE VisWeek General Chairs, Richard May, William Pike, and Pak Chung Wong, as well as the IEEE SciVis, InfoVis, and VAST Conference Chairs, Russell Taylor, Frank van Ham, and Jonathan C. Roberts, for their valuable advice at every stage. We thank the xi
Program Chairs, Gautam Chaudhary and Rachael Brady, for their considerable help in numerous ways. The IEEE VisWeek 2012 conference also features panels, tutorials, workshops, posters, the visualization contest, VAST challenge, birds-of-a-feather meetings, the doctoral colloquium, the discovery exhibition, the art show, the interactive demonstrations lab, among other events held throughout the week. None of these would exist were it not for the time and effort spent by our community members. We especially acknowledge the support of Ming Lin as Editor-inChief of TVCG, and Klaus Mueller as Chair of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC). Lastly, we would like to thank the TVCG team, Alicia Stickley, Erin Espriu, Steve Wareham, Hilda Carman, Joyce Arnold, and Kathleen Henry for their time and many efforts in helping VGTC produce these proceedings.
Paper Chairs and Guest Editors Jason Dykes
City University London
Jason Dykes is Professor of Visualization at the giCentre, City University London. He develops interactive cartographic techniques for exploring data and applications that implement them. Recent work involves hierarchically structured maps that are partially spatial. Jason cochairs the ICA Commission on Geovisualization and was lead editor of “Exploring GeoVisualization” (Dykes et al., 2005).
David Laidlaw Brown University
David H. Laidlaw is a Professor of computer science at Brown University. His research interests revolve around creating and studying visualization and computational modeling techniques that can be applied to problems in other scientific disciplines. Dr. Laidlaw has published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers; has served on or cochaired dozens of conference committees; has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics; and has been a recipient of a number of best panel, poster, and visualization awards from IEEE Visualization, ACM SIGGRAPH, and NSF.
Klaus Mueller Stony Brook University
Klaus Mueller is an associate professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University and his current research interests are visualization, visual analytics and medical imaging. He won the US National Science Foundation Career award in 2001, the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity in 2011, and has authored more than 140 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He is a senior member of the IEEE and Chair of the VGTC. xii
Giuseppe Santucci
Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”
Giuseppe Santucci is associate professor at Department of Computer Science of Sapienza Università di Roma. His main research activities concern user interfaces to databases, human computer interaction, and Information Visualization, focusing on expressive power and topological properties of visual query languages for semantic data models, on user interfaces development and assessment, on evaluation and quality aspects of Information Visualization and Visual Analytics. On such topics he published more than 100 papers on international Journals and conferences.
Gerik Scheuermann Stony Brook University
Gerik Scheuermann is a full professor for image and signal processing at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics, and a PhD in Computer Science, from the TU Kaiserslautern. His research interests are visualization, topology, image processing and Clifford algebras with applications in fluid dynamics, neuroscience, environmental science, biology and text mining.
Matthew Ward
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Mattthew Ward is currently a full professor in the Computer Science Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research interests include data and information visualization, visual analytics, and biovisualization. He has authored or coauthored more than 100 publications in these areas, and has recently co-authored a text book in the area of data visualization.
Chris Weaver University of Oklahoma
Chris Weaver is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Associate Director of the Center for Spatial Analysis at the University of Oklahoma. After earning a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was post-doctoral Research Associate with the GeoVISTA Center in the Department of Geography at Penn State, where he helped to found the North-East Visualization and Analytics Center. His research focuses on forms of visual interaction for exploration and analysis of heterogeneous multidimensional data.
