Scope and Challenges of Visual Analytics

Abstract

The science of Visual Analytics is a relatively new multidisciplinary field that combines various research areas including visualization, human-computer interaction, data analysis, data management, geo- spatial and temporal data processing and statistics. The goal of Visual Analytics is derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments; and communicate the assessment effectively for action. Providing visual access to and enabling insightful understanding of large amounts of complex data will be a major driving force in many research and technological development areas. The better integration of the increasing processing power of computers with the knowledgeable perception of the human user is a challenging and promising road to solutions for the information overload. Goal of the tutorial is to provide an overview of Visual Analytics, defining the scope of research in this novel area, outlining the challenges of different applications, and presenting Visual Analytics techniques and systems. The tutorial will provide the necessary background to understand the issues in the development and usage of Visual Analytics techniques. We will provide a number of case studies and show samples of commercial and academic Visual Analytics systems.