Abstract: Visually based techniques in computer graphics have blossomed. Important advances in perceptually driven rendering, realistic image display, high-fidelity visualization, and appearance-preserving geometric simplification have all been realized by applying knowledge of the limitations and capabilities of human visual processing. Much of this work is grounded in the physiology and psychophysics of early vision, which focuses on how visual mechanisms transduce and code the patterns of light arriving at the eye. The article surveys some of the fundamental findings in the study of early vision including basic visual anatomy and physiology, optical properties of the eye, light sensitivity and visual adaptation, and spatial vision.

Abstract: An empirical comparison of three commercial information visualization systems on three different databases is presented. The systems use different paradigms for visualizing data. Tasks were selected to be "ecologically relevant", i.e. meaningful and interesting in the respec- tive domains. Users of one system turned out to solve problems significantly faster than users of the other two, while users of another system would supply significantly more correct answers. Reasons for these results and general observations about the studied systems are discussed.

Abstract: The paper describes a system, Imsovision, for visualizing object-oriented software in a virtual reality Environment. A visualization language (COOL) is defined that maps C++ source code to a visual representation. Our aim is to develop a language with few metaphors and constructs, but with the ability to represent a variety of elements with no ambiguity or loss of meaning. In addition, the visualization has to maximally use the potential of the used media. The design of the OO software system and its attributes are represented in the visualization. Class information, relationships between classes, and metric information is displaced. VRML is used for the visualization and it is rendered in the CAVE environment.

Abstract: To work efficiently with decision support systems (DSS), most users benefit from representation conversion, i.e. translating the specific outcome from the DSS, normally portrayed in a numerical format, into the universal language of the visual. In general, interpretation of data is much more intuitive if the results from the DSS are translated into charts, maps, and other graphical displays because visualization exploits our natural ability to recognize and understand visual patterns. In this paper we discuss the concept of visualization user interface (VUI) for DSS. A proprietary software system known as AniGraftool is introduced as an example of an information visualization application for DSS. In addition, a visualized information retrieval engine based on fuzzy control is proposed.

Abstract: BLOOM is a system for doing software understanding through visualization. It provides facilities for static and dynamic data collection. It offers a wide range of data anal?yses. It includes a visual query language for specifying what information should be visualized. All these are used in con?junction with a back end that supports a variety of 2D and 3D visualization strategies.

Abstract: The goal of this research is to study the role and effects of the use of animated information visualization in the early stages of exploratory data analysis tasks. Despite the existence of a large body of research on information visualization, there is little known regarding how and when one should use and how to interact with animated visualization to help explore data. By animated visualization, we mean a type of information visualization technique that produces autonomous motions of representations. This research explored the issue from two aspects: what cognitive effects animated information visualization has, and what interactions people have with animated visualization when exploring data. We conducted two user studies to investigate each aspect, and identified research challenges for designing an interactive animated information visualization environment that supports the early stages of exploratory data analysis. These findings help us further study how to extend the notions developed in spatial visualization to temporal visualization - e.g. what focus+context means when applied to the time dimension in animated visualization.

Abstract: In this paper we describe a novel use of augmented reality for information visualization. We detail the use of augmented reality as a component of InVision - an open framework for the development and deployment on visualization systems. The research discussed in this paper is part of an ongoing project into pervasive computing.

Abstract: Visualizations of subspaces on the World Wide Web can provide users the ability to identify relevant information from a set of Web pages, while gaining new insights or understanding of the space. This study tested three classes of visualization techniques, distortion, zoom, and expanding outline, to better understand which classes of visualization techniques may better represent the underlying structure. The effects of different visualization techniques on user performance on information searching tasks and the effects of different sizes of the Web spaces were studied. Eighty participants were asked to search information with and without a visualization tool over the large Web space. The factors that may have caused cognitive overloads are further discussed.

Abstract: With the advances in information technology over the last decade, the traditional teaching format of having an individual lecture to an audience has been supplemented, and in some cases, replaced by the rapid development and implementation of new distance learning methods. As technology rapidly changes, the importance of educating and training diverse populations of civil/construction engineering/science students becomes more critical. Traditional lecture format teaching methods sometimes fall short of conveying the complex analysis and design principles that need to be mastered in structural design. However when the theories are exemplified in a virtual environment with multimedia, animation, interaction, and manipulated image visualization techniques in a virtual reality environment, students' conceptual understanding are enhanced. The important advantages of the virtual reality environment over other computerbased design tools are that it enables the user to interact with the simulation to conceptualize relations that are not apparent from a less dynamic representation, and to visualize models that are difficult to understand in other ways. The interactive nature of virtual environments made it a natural extension to the 3-D graphics that enable students to visualize real life structures before actually building them. The main objective of this research was to create an innovative structural design concept visualization methodology on a web-based interactive virtual environment. The principal elements of the presented approach are: animation, user interaction, manipulated image visualization, and virtual navigation. The presented paper illustrates the design concept visualization techniques for flexural and shear behavior of reinforced concrete beams. It was created using mainly Java and Virtual Reality Modeling Languages (VRML). The presented teaching and learning methodology employed a generic architecture, which was discipline/course independent, and can be adapted to various other civil/construction engineering/science courses that will certainly promote and enhance students’ subject visualization and conceptual understanding.

Abstract: This paper describes a new method for visualizing complex information spaces as painted images. Scientific visualization converts data into pictures that allow viewers to "see" trends, relationships, and patterns. We introduce a formal definition of the correspondence between traditional visualization techniques and painterly styles from the Impressionist art movement. This correspondence allows us to apply perceptual guidelines from visualization to control the presentation of information in a computer-generated painting. The result is an image that is visually engaging, but that also allows viewers to rapidly and accurately explore and analyze the underlying data values. We conclude by applying our technique to a collection of environmental and weather readings, to demonstrate its viability in a practical, real-world visualization environment.

Abstract: Through evolution, the human visual system has developed the ability to process natural textures. However, in addition to natural textures, humans also visually process man-made textures - some of the richest and most compelling of which are in works of art. Art goes beyond what perceptual psychologists understand about visual perception and there remain fundamental lessons that we can learn from art and art history that we can apply to our visualization problems. This article describes and illustrates some of the visualization lessons we have learned from studying art. I believe that these examples also illustrate some of the potential benefits of further study. While this approach is more open-ended than a perceptual psychology approach, both approaches are worthy of pursuit, and the potential benefits of using the less structured approach outweigh any risk of failure.

Abstract: The audiovisual library of the future will be based on computerized access to digitized documents. In this communication, we address the user interface issues which will arise from this new situation. One cannot simply transfer a user interface designed for the piece by piece production of some audiovisual presentation and make it a tool for accessing full-length movies in an electronic library. One cannot take a digital sound editing tool and propose it as a means to listen to a musical recording. In our opinion, when computers are used as mediations to existing contents, document representation-based user interfaces are needed. With such user interfaces, a structured visual representation of the document contents is presented to the user, who can then manipulate it to control perception and analysis of these contents. In order to build such manipulable visual representations of audiovisual documents, one needs to automatically extract structural information from the documents contents. In this communication, we describe possible visual interfaces for various temporal media, and we propose methods for the economically feasible large scale processing of documents. The work presented is sponsored by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France: it is part of the program aiming at developing for image and sound documents an experimental counterpart to the digitized text reading workstation of this library.

Abstract: This paper describes how we used regression rules to improve upon a result previously published in the Earth science literature In such a scientific application of machine learning, it is crucially important for the learned models to be understandable and communicable We recount how we selected a learning algorithm to maximize communicability, and then describe two visualization techniques that we developed to aid in understanding the model by exploiting the spatial nature of the data We also report how evaluating the learned models across time let us discover an error in the data

Abstract: Today’s digital libraries are content rich, multimedia, multilingual collections that are distributed and accessed worldwide. Digital libraries’ interfaces are playing a crucial role in helping users to achieve an easy and effective access to the information that they need. Visual interfaces represent one of the most exciting areas of research and development in digital libraries. Visual interfaces to digital libraries aim to reduce the user’s cognitive load by capitalizing on our powerful perceptual abilities. Research in visual interfaces has a strong connection to the fast-moving field of Information Visualization. Information Visualization Information visualization is interdisciplinary in nature, involving computer graphics, electronic engineering, information systems, geography, information science, just to name a few. It has been seen to have a tremendous potential of improving the way we access, process, and manage information. Information Visualization is a process of transforming and representing a wide variety of data, especially non-spatial and non-numerical data, in a visual form so as to help users to understand the information. It uses computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of

Abstract: s with Geometry Displayable Visual Representations Domain Problem Space Analysis Rendering Pattern Discovery and Data Aggregation Image Construction Human ProblemSolving Theory Information Analysis Theory Techniques in Knowledge Discovery Discipline Human Visual Perception and Processing Theory Graphic System Theory Techniques in Scientific Visualization Discipline Graphics Construction Rules 3.1 Domain problem space analysis This process is about the users and tasks of the business domain. One needs to analyze what types of problem human beings have to solve in a specific business domain, how they solve the problems, and how they evaluate the solutions before starting to design visual representations. Some problem-solving

Abstract: The Delaunay system supports a visual language that is specifically geared to the querying and visualization of databases. In this paper, we concentrate on the information visualization capabilities of the system. A distinctive feature of Delaunay is its full personalization capabilities: users can define their visualizations from scratch without limiting themselves to pre-defined visualization modes. Fine customization of the visualization is achieved by the availability of a visual alphabet of atomic graphical symbols and by the expressive power of the visual query language, which supports recursion. We describe the key components of the Delaunay system, namely its interface modules, which support advanced visualization techniques and principles, and its efficient constraint solver. The successful implementation of Delaunay demonstrates the feasibility of a powerful database system with which users can effectively specify a wide variety of visualizations supporting data and visualization exploration for different kinds of applications including graph visualization and business analysis.

Abstract: A major hindrance to the usage of information visualization in common tasks is that typically a new visualization interface must be custom programmed to suit each task. This video demonstrates a system and user interface that attempts to solve this problem by enabling end users to construct their own multiple-view visualization interfaces that are appropriate for their tasks and data. Users accomplish this by snapping together component visualizations and specifying tight couplings between them. Then they can use their newly constructed visualization interfaces to perform their tasks.

Abstract: Scientific Visualization is currently a very active and vital area of research, teaching and development. The success of Scientific Visualization is mainly due to the soundness of the basic premise behind it, that is, the basic idea of using computer-generated pictures to gain information and understanding from data (geometry) and relationships (topology). This is an extremely intiutive and very important concept which is having a profound and wide spread impact on the methodology of science and engineering. In this survey we are concentrating on three main research areas in Scientific Visualization - Intelligent Visualization Systems - Visualization of Vector- and Tensorfields - Augmented Reality Simulation

Abstract: The simultaneous use of images obtained from different sources is common in medical diagnosis. However, even though the quality of these images has been improving, the integration of multimodality data into a unique 3D representation is still non-trivial. To overcome this problem, multimodal visualization techniques provide better insight by finding suitable strategies to integrate different characteristics of multiple data sets into a single visual representation. This paper describes a framework for interactive multimodal visualization of 3D medical images, focusing on the multimodal visualization model and requirements for developing such systems. A short overview of multimodal visualization systems and techniques is also presented.

Abstract: Provides advanced visualization and interaction paradigms to support Web browsing through the intensive use of bookmarks, navigation history and best-of lists. Our approach is motivated by past studies of Web browsing patterns that proved the usefulness of such tools even though standard browsers provide very few interaction and visualization features for them. In this paper, we first motivate our work and present our main visualization and interaction paradigms. We then present the architecture we used to integrate interactive visualization with normal Web navigation. We then review lessons learned. Further, we report the results of a preliminary comparative user study conducted to evaluate the effect of the use of our visualization and interaction techniques on user performances.

Abstract: We propose an interactive visualization method suitable for exploratory data analysis. In this type of data analysis, statistical charts are employed to help the user understand the target data, and a displayed chart is redrawn interactively according to the user's input inspired by looking at the chart. Two factors must be considered if the chart is to be suitably redrawn: the type of chart displayed and the parts of the chart that are changed by the user's input. We developed our proposed method based on these factors. As the first step of the method, the part to change and the details to meet the given user's input for the displayed chart are interpreted. Then, a semantic frame used to generate a statistical chart from data is updated by the results of the interpretation, and several candidates as appropriate chart-types are chosen based on the frame and chart-type determination rules. Finally, the most preferable chart is chosen from among the candidates according to the type of user input, and the displayed chart is transformed into a new chart with animation. By using this method, data can be visualized interactively according to the change of the user's viewpoint without interrupting the thinking process.

Abstract: A number of researchers have shown that scientific visualization provides enhanced understanding in domains with significant information complexity Unfortunately, the task of creating engineering visualization, especially immersive visualization, is highly complex and lacks high-level tools that would simplify the development process This paper describes a framework that is designed to simplify the process of making an immersive visualization of the structural analysis of building structures The paper describes the components of the framework and describes two applications that were created in order to test their functionality

Abstract: cientists nowadays have unprecedented computing and instrumental capability for studying natural phenomena at greater accuracy, resulting in an explosive growth of data. For example, the data generated by modeling next-generation accelerators can have from hundreds of millions to billions of particle paths. For Earth sciences turbulence calculations, each run can produce thousands of time steps of 1024 3 volume data. The increasing resolution of medical imaging instrumentation has resulted in data of unprecented size, as demonstrated by the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human project. A new sensor technology known as MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) will constantly produce massive data streams that we don't know how to consume yet. Since the publication of the National Science Foundation panel report 1 in 1987 recommending a new initiative in visualization in scientific computing, government agencies and universities have invested in tremendous research and development efforts, which have led to many research innovations in scientific visu-alization. However, after more than 10 years, current data handling and visualization capacities still seem orders of magnitude too small for scientists to interpret the voluminous and complex data they're capable of producing routinely. The Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), which seeks to develop high-performance modeling and simulation tools for stockpile certification, has driven a second push for advancing visualization technology. Under the ASCI program, the most powerful parallel supercomputers ever built are now operated at several of the DOE labs. Each of the five ASCI alliance programs (dynamic response of materials, integrated turbulence simulation, astrophysical thermonuclear flashes, simulation of advanced rockets, and simulation of accidental fires and explorations) can produce terascale data beyond the reach of current visualization tools. These ASCI-class projects can lead to revolutionary advances in science and engineering only with appropriate data analysis and visualization support. Recognizing the urgent need to solve the large data visualization problem, a few years ago the NSF and DOE sponsored a series of workshops on large-scale data management and visualization. Three were held in 1998. A seminal report titled Data and Visualization Corridors 2 resulted from these workshops. This report provides a five-year roadmap for scientific visualization research and development. Another workshop held in May 1999, organized by Chris Johnson, John Reynders, and I, fostered further exchanges between visualization researchers and application scientists (see http://graphics.cs.ucdavis. edu/~ma/LDV99). A few months later, NSF announced an initiative in large scientific and software data-set visu-alization and subsequently funded 11 projects. …

Abstract: This paper discusses the visualization of the relationships in e-commerce transactions. To date, many practical researchprojects have shown the usefulness of a physics-based mass-spring technique to layout data items with close relationships on a graph. We describe a market basket analysis visualization system (MAY) using this technique. This system is described as the following: (1) integrates a physics-based engine into a visual data mining platform; (2) uses a 3D sphericalsurface to visualize the cluster of related data items; and (3) for large volumes of transactions, uses hidden structures tounclutter the display. Several examples of market basket analysis are also provided.Keywords: visualization, association, physics-based mass spring, market basket analysis, spherical surface 1. INTRODUCTION Market basket analysis requires the analysis and mining of large volumes of transaction data for making business decisions.It has become a key success factor in e-commerce. Effective market basket analysis techniques employ association andclustering as methods of analyzing such data. E-commerce transactions often consist of several products (items) that arepurchased together. Understanding the relationships across hundreds of product lines and among millions of transactionsprovides visibility and predictability of product affinity. An example of market basket analysis is that 85%

Abstract: The design of easy -to-use and informative visual interfaces to digital libraries is an integral part to the advances of digital libraries. A wide range of approaches have been developed from a diverse spectrum of perspectives that focus on users and tasks to be supported, data to be modeled, and the efficiency of algorithms. Information visualization aims to exploit the human visual information processing system, especially with non-spatial data (such as documents and images typically found in digital libraries). Generally, information visualization examines semantic relationships intrinsic to an abstract information space and how they can be spatially navigated and memorized using similar cognitive processes to those that would apply during interactions with the ‘real world’. This workshop promotes the convergence of information visualization and digital libraries. It brings together researchers and practitioners in the areas of information visualization, digital libraries, human-computer interaction, library and information science, and computer science to identify the most important issues in the past and the present, and what should be done in the future.

Abstract: Advances in computing technology and the affordability of software and high-performance graphics hardware enabled rapid growth of visual tools. Today, not only very expensive workstations, but also lowcost PCs are capable of running computationally demanding visualization systems. Algorithm visualizations or the graphic depictions of algorithms in execution are being used in explaining, designing, analysing algorithms, and in debugging, fine-tuning, and documenting programs. Although many tools have been developed over the past twenty years, little attention has been paid to the analysis of users, their needs, tasks, and goals. This paper gives a brief overview of the preliminary design stage of algorithm visualizations, namely the analysis of requirements.

Abstract: Software visualization has been almost exclusively tackled from the visual point of view; this means visualization occurs exclusively through the visual channel This approach has its limitations Considering previous work for blind people we propose that complementing usual approaches with those techniques used to develop interfaces for non-sighted people can enhance user awareness of logical structures or data types using different perception channels To achieve better comprehension, we deal with new or augmented interfaces built on top of standard systems for data visualization and algorithm animation The notion of specific concept keyboards is introduced As a consequence, modern information and learning systems can be designed in such a way that not only sighted but also blind users can navigate within these systems

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new style of visualization called Situational Visualization, in which the user of a robust, mobile visualization system uses mobile computing resources to enhance the experience and understanding of the surrounding world. Additionally, a Situational Visualization system allows the user to add to the visualization and any underlying simulation by inputting the user's observations of the phenomena of interest, thus improving the quality of visualization for the user and for any other users that may be connected to the same database. Situational Visualization allows many users to collaborate on a common set of data with real-time acquisition and insertion of data. In this paper, we present a Situational Visualization system we are developing called Mobile VGIS, and present two sample applications of Situational Visualization.

Abstract: A new approach to temporal aspects of visualization is proposed. Empirical and theoretical studies of visualization processes are presented in a more general context of human-computer interaction (HCI). It makes possible to develop a new model of HCI as a base for visualization. This model implements a methodology of autonomous intelligent agents. Temporal aspects of the model are rooted in the system theory of time. This theoretical background provides for obtaining properties of time coordination. In particular, it is proved that some theoretically advanced models for computation and visualization cannot be realized by physical devices. Applications of the model, its implications for visualization and problems of realization are considered. The new approach does not refute or eliminate previous research in this area, but puts it in a more general and adequate context, systematizing it and providing efficient facilities for the development of computer visualization.