Vis. Center Student Research

Seamless Computer Human Interaction Techniques Presenters: Alex Midgett   My thesis explores methods for data exploration and visualization which limit the amount of interruption the user experiences from their tools and interface. Hopefully they have heightened awareness to changes in data when they are not bogged down by complex menu systems and other UI items. Change blindness often comes with interruptions such minimizing them will be helpful in exploratory tasks. Exploring the role of emotion in visualization Presenters: Lane Harrison   Most visualization research treats the human perceptual and cognitive systems as a "black box" that takes input (visualization) and produces output (interaction, insights, etcetera). Fortunately, recent research has begun to peek inside this box by investigating aspects such as creativity and personality differences and their effect on visualization performance. However, despite emotion's critical role in human decision making processes, we still know little of the role of emotion in visualization. This research seeks to identify the role of emotion in visualization, starting with an experiment evaluating emotion's role in graphical perception tasks. Refreshments will be served