Keynote by John Stasko

Visualization for Information Exploration and Analysis

Making sense of data becomes more challenging as the data grows larger and becomes more complex. If a picture truly can be worth a thousand words, then clever visualizations of data should hold promise in helping people with sense-making tasks. I firmly believe that visual representations of data can help people to better explore, analyze, and understand it, thus transforming the data into information. In this talk, I will explain how visualization and visual analytics help people make sense of data and I will provide many such examples. I also will describe my present research into visualization for investigative analysis. This project explores how visual analytics can help investigators examine a large document collection in order to discover embedded stories and narratives scattered across the documents in the collection.

Biography

John Stasko is a Professor and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is Director of the Information Interfaces Research Group. His research is in the area of Human-Computer Interaction with a specific focus on information visualization and visual analytics. He has published extensively on these topics and others during his academic career. Stasko is Director of the Georgia Tech component of the Southeast Regional Visualization and Analytics Center. He is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, and Information Visualization. He was General Chair in 2007 and Papers Co-Chair in 2005 and 2006 for the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) Conference, and he was Program Chair for the 2003 ACM Symposium on Software Visualization and the 2000 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages.