TITLE: Progress in Learning to Visualize

PRESENTER: Randy Goebel

AFFILIATION: Computing Science, University of Alberta

DATE: Friday 12th March 2004

TIME: 11:00am-12:00noon

PLACE: Seminar Room K17

ABSTRACT:

Visualization is the process of transforming data into pictures with the goal of helping humans understand complex information. Current research on visualization exploits a kind of cognitive engineering, where a priori properties of data are rendered within visual spaces (e.g.., shape, colour, size, motion) to help provide insight into key data relationships.

The predominant use of visualization is to understand complex data and complex processes in terms of familiar visual metaphors. For example, one can create artificial images of the molecular landscapes created by scanning tunnelling microscopes, provide abstract pictures of web log usage, or even provide rendered surfaces that depict the dynamic behaviour of search procedures used in combinatorial optimization.

We describe some progress on a perhaps overly ambitious project, which seeks to define visualization properties that will eventually provide the basis for machine learning tools to create useful visualizations. We review aspects of a variety of visualization projects and assess their value within the context of a general framework for visualization.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:

R.G. (Randy) Goebel is currently professor and chair in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He received the B.Sc. (Computer Science), M.Sc. (Computing Science), and Ph.D. (Computer Science) from the Universities of Regina, Alberta, and British Columbia, respectively.

Professor Goebel's research is focused on the theory and application of intelligent systems. His theoretical work on abduction, hypothetical reasoning and belief revision is well know, and his recent application of practical belief revision and constraint programming to scheduling, layout, and web mining is now having industrial impact. His most recent research interests are in web mining, machine learning and visualization.

Randy has previously held faculty appointments at the University of Waterloo and the University of Tokyo, and is actively involved in academic and industrial collaborative research projects in Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany and Malaysia.

Host:

Thomas Meyer
National ICT, Australia, Sydney Node
Building K17, Computer Science and Engineering
The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia
URL: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~tmeyer/

Seminar Convenor:

Bernhard Hengst
Tel: +61-2-9385-3988,
E-mail: bernhardh@cse.unsw.edu.au
School of Computer Science & Engineering, UNSW.