It's my great pleasure to announce here BELIV'10: BEyond time and errors: novel evaLuation methods for Information Visualization, a workshop on infovis evaluation I am organizing together with Adam Perer from IBM and Heidi Lam from Google.

The idea of the workshop was born in 2006 almost by chance when me, my phd advisor Giuseppe (Beppe) Santucci, and Catherine Plaisant had the possibility to organize a workshop at AVI 2006 and felt that it was time to gather some people and talk about the problem of evaluation in infovis.

The first workshop was a real success with very interesting discussions and (highly cited) papers out of it. After this experience we thought that having a BELIV every two years could be a good idea and the right time frame. In fact we organized it again at CHI 2008 and now again at CHI 2010.

The goal of BELIV is to raise fundamental questions about evaluation. The main big question around the workshop, and the reason why we believe it is important, is that visualization still needs to explain why, when, and how it is useful and we don't have the right tools yet to fully answer these questions.

So, if you are interested in participating there are two options: submit a position paper or a regular research paper. Position papers present a personal view on evaluation and are meant to introduce your point of view in the workshop discussion. Research papers are meant to provide substantial contributions to the research community with novel ideas.

A great plus of this edition is that it is two-day workshop and that it will be a lot more interactive than past editions. Despite its success many participants to past editions voiced the need to have less presentations and more productive discussions, and we strongly agreed with them.

So, BELIV 2010 will be based on short presentations on Day 1, with planned sessions to collect relevant issues for the next day. Day 2 will be all centered around the discussion of the collected issues.

Many more details can be found at the workshop website, where you can also find links to previous editions so that you can better understand what a BELIV workshop is.

For any questions please send me an email or post a comment here.

Data is largely available, no question. Everywhere we hear that the new big trend is data crunching and that the great thing of years 2000 is the large provision of freely available data sets. Just recently the US Government has released data.gov, and this event has been acclaimed by numerous people in visualization and in data analysis as a big step toward a better world. Ok, data is good. All of it is good. But I think we are getting overly excited about it.

I see a dangerous trend here: thinking that data is the only thing we need and that having large data at our hands will solve some problems. But, data per se has no real value if it is not related to problems and people! So, I see many new interesting web sites (and tools!) popping up on the Internet but I don't see any guidance about what to do with them.Read More ...

I am sorry guys, I feel a strong need to share my frustration with you today. I have discovered yet another infovis library to create the most beautiful visualizations in the world and instead of being excited I am depressed. That's great I really champion the effort of these good guys but a tough question keep hammering in my head: why so many libraries and so few tools? Libraries are great and really needed to speed up the development process but here I perceive a dangerous trend: there are a lot more libraries than real tools written with them!

Shame on me, I didn't keep my word on reporting from EuroVis. Anyway here is a very small selection of the remarkable things I have seen during the conference.

Pat Hanrahan's talk was really deep and thoughtful. A lot of new basic material to think about visualization under a new lens.

Then I forced myself to select only 3 paper out of the long program. They are engaging and new in some sense. Obviously this is totally personal. And there were many other good ones worth reading.

Hi there! I'm writing from Berlin where I came to attend the EuroVis 2009 conference. EuroVis is the premier conference on visualization in Europe and every year it hosts a mix of very interesting SciVis and InfoVis works.

The program is out and you can give it a look here. The program comprises also a keynote from Pat Hanrahan, which I'm really looking forward to see. It has the promising title: "Systems of Thought: When to Use Visual Representations in Problem Solving".

This is just a short notice to tell you that I intend to post at least one post a day to wrap up on the things I see and to share my thoughts with you. I'll also try to showcase the most interesting works.

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P.S. If any of you is also attending EuroVis'09 drop me a line, we might end up drinking a good German beer in one of the many wonderful places this city has ;-)

Yesterday in a meeting with our industrial partners I received yet another lesson. Simply put: though fancy and well-crafted visualization is useless if it doesn't help people take actions.

Ok I must admit it, this is maybe only true in business sectors (is it?) but what I come to realize is that we infovis enthusiasts are too much focused on the never ending refrain that visualization is useful to explore data and that we need it to make sense of things.

This is certainly true but this is only part of the story. Take the million managers out there. Not trained to cope with complex stats or charting tools but desperately in need to take decisions based on data. What do they need? To explore and make sense of thing? Sure, to some extent ... but ultimately to take complex decisions in a very constrained setting and tight time limits.

Almost by chance I discovered there is a new Stephen Few's book coming out soon. It is has a wonderful title: "Now you see it" and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Book for practitioners, not designer!" claiming that we are desperately in need of books that teach how to perform interactive visual data analysis. And this book looks like just the perfect response to what I expressed in my post. From the book description:

"Now You See It does for data analysis what Stephen Few's book Show Me the Numbers does for data presentation: it teaches simple, fundamental, practical techniques that anyone can use--only this time they're for making sense of information, not presenting it."

Wow, This is what I was looking for! A book that teaches how to analyze data with visual interactive tools. And one written for casual users, in need to analze some data in their work, not for highly skilled statisticians and engineers. And not for designers.

I'm really looking forward to reading it. I hope (I'm sure though) it will meet my expectation. Well done Stephen!

P.S. It has such a beautiful cover! Isn't it?

I was talking with Ilya, a new PhD student in our department, the other day and in front of a prototype he developed he said something like: "oh yes, and I should find the right color mapping here but ... how?" Oh well ... good question! Originally I wanted to write a whole new post on it but after some reasonings I came to the conclusion that not only it is a daunting task but also and more importantly I don't know enough to seriously teach about it.

But wait a minute, does it mean I cannot help him and the ever increasing pool of poor color choosers? No, there is one thing I can do at least: share my list of favorite sources of information on color. And maybe add some tips and rules of thumb I often use for myself.

So, no more excuses to use poor color schemes. Here is my annotated list of resources, plus some personal tips.

A bit of self promotion here on Visuale today!

It's my pleasure to introduce to you one recent work of ours: The Extended Excentric Labeling. It is an extension to the original interactive labeling technique called Excentric Labeling, which was developed by Jean Daniel Fekete and Catherine Plaisant in 1998 at the University of Maryland. We extended it to solve some problems present in the original version and it will be presented and published at the next EuroVis 2009 conference in Berlin, next June.

Here is the EuroVis'09 Paper (pdf) and a Video (mp4) we produced to showcase the technique.

The New Scientist has just published an article on an amazing recent study conducted by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre on the remoteness of places in the world. The remoteness is calculated taking into account how long it takes to travel by land or water to the nearest place with a least a population of 50.000 inhabitants. Here is the result.