Solving Problems with Visual Analytics: The Role of Visualization and Analytics in Exploring Multidimensional Data

Solving Problems with Visual Analytics: The Role of Visualization and Analytics in Exploring Multidimensional Data
Professor Daniel Keim, Monday, August 19, 12:30 pm, 140 Woodward

Never before in history has data been generated and collected at such high volumes as it is today. As the volumes of multidimensional data available to businesses, scientists, and the public increase, their effective use becomes more challenging. Visual analytics seeks to provide people with effective ways to understand and analyze largemultidimensional data sets, while also enabling them to act upon their findings immediately. It integrates the analytic capabilities of the computer and the abilities of the human analyst, allowing novel discoveries and empowering individuals to take control of the analytical process. In the visual analysis process, it is not obvious what can be done by automated analysis and what has to be done by interactive visual methods. In dealing with massive data, the use of automated methods is mandatory, but there is also a wide range of problems where the use of interactive visual methods is necessary. The talk presents the potential of visual analytics and discusses the role of automated versus interactive visual techniques. A variety of application examples ranging from document analysis over network security to molecular biology illustrate the exiting potential of visual analysis techniques but also their limitations.

DANIEL A. KEIM is full professor and head of the Information Visualization and Data Analysis Research Group in the Computer Science Department of the University of Konstanz, Germany. He has been actively involved in database, data analysis, and information visualization research for more than 20 years and developed a number of novel visual analysis techniques for very large data sets. He has been program co-chair of the IEEE InfoVis and IEEE VAST symposia as well as the SIGKDD conference, and he is member of the IEEE VAST as well as EuroVis steering committees. He is an associate editor of Palgrave’s Information Visualization Journal (since 2001) and has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (1999 – 2004), Datenbank-Spektrum (2011 – 2009), the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2002 – 2007), and the Knowledge and Information System Journal (2006 – 2011). He is coordinator of the DFG German Strategic Research Initiative (SPP) “Scalable Visual Analytics”, the BMBF research initiative on “Visual Analytics for Security Applications” (VASA), and he has been the scientific coordinator of the EU Coordination Action “Visual Analytics –Mastering the Information Age” (VisMaster). Dr. Keim got his Ph.D. and habilitation degrees in computer science from the University of Munich. Before joining the University of Konstanz, Dr. Keim was associate professor at the University of Halle, Germany and Technology Consultant at AT&T Shannon Research Labs, NJ, USA.