Visuale

In a couple of weeks I will be attending the Vis/InfoVis/VAST co-hosted conferences in Sacramento.

This is always the best opportunity to know about the cutting edge and latest developments in the field and, most important, to meet old friends and new people.

This year the conference is full of events. I skimmed through the program and I can already find a lot of interesting presentations I would like to attend. The program is a bit of a mess since some sessions will be overlapping from time to time, but this is a price to pay for the success of the whole field. I will have to find the right path among the events and jump from one room to another without bothering anyone, I hope ;-)

I'm really eager to attend the InfoVis Capstone talk by Stephen Few. Stephen has a long experience of using visualization in the business environment (down the trenches I would say! :-)) and I am sure he will have something interesting to say to a very much research oriented audience. The title is already quite promising "InfoVis as Seen by the World Out There: 2007 in Review".

The Art Exhibit is also something I am looking forward to see. The artistic side of visualization is really exciting for its ability to create pleasurable presentations that make you think and can always be a source for ideas to apply out of the artistic context. The list of presented works looks already quite promising.

This is for me the first time I attend VAST and I really want to see how different it is from InfoVis. I am particularly in favor of an applied approach to visualization and VAST seems to be the right place to present and see this type of works.

I will also try to attend the most interactive events like the BOF and the Interactive Demonstrations Lab. I like them because there is more space to interact, to talk freely, and to put your hands on the real systems.

I will be attending the whole conference from Oct 28 to Nov 1. I will attend the VizSec Workshop (on Oct, 29) and present a paper at VAST ("SpiralView: Towards Security Policies Assessment through Visual Correlation of Network Resources with Evolution of Alarms") early in the morning (08:30-10:10) on Thursday Nov 1.

If you will be at the conference please drop me a line! I am really curious to see you face to face and to discuss about visualization, blogs ... or something else.

You want some tips on how to survive on a one week long conference? He is my favorite resource: "How to get the most out of conferences" from Scott Berkun. Enjoy it!

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.