News
Jason Dykes' keynote at the annual GISRUK conference in Liverpool entitled: Information visualisation: what's going on? was well-received. Iain Dillingham presented Types, Granularities and Combinations of Geographic Objects in the Haiti Crisis Map and Aidan Slingsby presented work on Historical Migration in Ireland. The conference was well-organised and a lot of good work was presented this year.
Jo and Aidan participated in the Dagstuhl seminar on Drawing Graphs and Maps with Curves. We discussed and worked on multidisciplinary solutions to open problems involving the use of curves that were proposed by participants.
Jason, Jo, Aidan, Alex, Iain and Roger participated in GeoViz Hamburg, a workshop characterised by short focussed presentations, demos and plenty of discussion time. We presented "Visualizing the Geographies of the Haiti Crisis Map," Classifying travel behaviour within a largescale, origin-destination dataset: developing a Visual Analytics approach, "An Exploratory Interface to Public Data for Citizens", "Investigating Spatial Patterns in User-Generated Photographic Datasets by Means of Interactive Visual Analytics" and "Green Spaces: Interactively Mapping the Results of a Public Consultation". Please contact us if you're interested in knowing any more about these pieces of work.
Roger gave a talk at King's College London's Urban Digital event about his work exploring the behaviour London's Bike Hire scheme users, using visual analytics. The seminar was concerned with recent uses of mapping and spatial analysis techniques in the context of urban transport, community cohesion and climate.
City University is offering studentships for 3 year full-time PhD candidates. Successful candidates will have tuition fees paid and a tax-free bursary that will cover living costs. This university-wide competition is very competitive and only strong candidates with strong proposals will be considered.
This is a great opportunity to do a PhD with us and we will help candidates develop strong research proposals. Have a look at our research interests and list of potential PhD topics to help you develop your research proposal. We are happy to discuss your ideas with you and if you send us your proposal by 15th February we will provide you feedback by a week before the 1st March deadline.
City University is offering studentships for 3-year full-time PhD candidates (deadline 1st March). Successful candidates will have tuition fees paid and a tax-free bursary that will cover living costs. This university-wide competition is very competitive and only strong candidates with strong proposals will be considered. This is a great opportunity to do a PhD with us and we will help candidates develop strong research proposals. Use our research interests and list of potential PhD topics to help develop your research proposal. We are happy to informally discuss ideas by email and if you email us your proposal by 15th February we will give you feedback within a week.
Congratulations to Roger who won the Smeed Prize for the best student paper at the 45th University Transport Studies Group Conference. Fourteen papers were shortlisted for the award, which takes into account the sophistication of the work, quality of the conference talk and the student's performance in answering questions. Roger was competing amongst a group of final year and completing PhD students.
Jo and Aidan participated in the Dagstuhl workshop on the representation, analysis and visualization of moving objects working with researchers from animal ecology, GIS, computational geometry and visualisation backgrounds. Aidan's entry to the data challenge helps assess how well the modelled behaviour of gulls correspond to their observed behaviour.
Jo Wood gave a talk on visualising 16 million cycle journeys across the UK capital at the TEDx EastEnd movement without borders event, which showcases the work that we are doing with TFL on understanding how the public bike hire scheme is being used. See the video here.
Jason, Jo, Aidan, Donia, Iain, Roger and Sarah very much enjoyed attending VisWeek in Seattle, at which Jason was InfoVis papers co-chair. Between us, we presented nine contributions to the conference: a paper on sketchy graphics for infovis, award-winning work on network health, a position paper about involving users in design at the BELIV workshop, a poster on internal migration in Ireland, a poster on photo-sharing datasets, a poster on narrative construction, a poster on supporting the designer-user, a poster on cycling behaviour and a poster on household energy consumption.
Alex, Iain, Roger, Sarah, Nabiha and Aidan's entry (see paper and video) to the VAST Challenge won an award for Efficient Use of Visualization and will be presented at the VAST Challenge Workshop in Seattle in October. The VAST Challenge is an annual contest in which a large dataset is supplied and solutions to question are sought using visual analytics. The giCentre has entered this contest four times and this is the third award that we have won.
Jo's beautiful bike-share animation has featured on the New Scientist blog, The Guardian and The Economist and other outlets. Bike usage is shown as animated trails between bike stations. By varying the trail length and prominence of the more common journey, structure emerges from the apparent chaos of journeys.
Jason Dykes and Aidan Slingsby ran an intensive week-long module at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, based on Jo Wood's excellent DataVis module offered to our students. The module taught theory, design and how to implement them in Processing. Students (most of whom had no previous programming experience) were able to produce nice interactive maps of Japan census data by the end of the week. Contact us if you'd like to know more about our course offerings.
Aidan was invited to give a talk at the Center for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo. He talked about the recent Nokia Data Challenge including the giCentre's entry, London's bike-share scheme and OD maps. These overlap with the centre's interests in map schematisation and visualising moving object data, in which they are doing good work.
Jason, Jo and Aidan participated in a workshop at Oxford university about challenges in geographical visualisation, organised by Min Chen and Jason Dykes. The diverse participation made the workshop a useful forum for discussion and making new contacts.
We've had six posters accepted for Visweek in Seattle this October, representing a broad range of our work, including OD Maps for Studying Historical Internal Migration in Ireland led by Aidan, Using Visual Analytics to Detect Problems in Datasets Collected From Photo-Sharing Services led by Alex, The Effect of Information Visualization Delivery on Narrative Construction and Development led by Donia, A Design, Analysis and Evaluation Model to Support the Visualization Designer-User led by Iain, A Visual Analytics Approach to Understanding Cycling Behaviour led by Roger and Visualising Variations in Household Energy Consumption led by Sarah.
Our paper Sketchy Rendering for Information Visualization - led by Jo Wood, with Jason, Aidan and external collaborators Petra Isenberg, Tobias Isenberg and Nadia Boukhelifa - has been accepted to Infovis at Visweek in Seattle in October. It describes how to construct information visualisation in a hand-drawn style and considers the impact this can have on those interpreting such graphics through user-studies. It then reflects on the potential uses of "sketchiness" in information visualisation.
Iain attended the second MODAP-MOVE summer school on privacy aware social mining about the state of the art in privacy-preserving social mining techniques. Read his reflections on his blog.
Roger and Jo went to TfL to present their early analysis of customer data from the London bike share scheme. There were some excellent suggestions from TfL’s policy team about possible analysis directions; lots of important questions about the barriers and incentives that might affect demand, about how to attract new user groups, as well as how to better understand changes in cycling behaviour as the scheme expands and matures.
Aidan gave a talk at about Visual Analytics for Social Science Data and Problems at the EPSRC-funded workshop that marked the launch of the Centre for GeoInformatics at the University of St Andrews. The workshop focused on exciting and applied uses of Geographic Information Science and GeoInformatics, and had a range of interesting talks on GIS for natural and social sciences, spatial analysis of movement, networks and digital humanities by Urska Demsar, Carson Farmer, Stewart Fotheringham, Paul Longley, Rob Wiebel, John Wilson and Keiji Yano.
City University London is funding two-year research post-doctoral positions for candidates with proven relevant research excellence. We are keen to attract research-excellent candidates to join our vibrant team and develop our research profile. Please see our information page for more details. The deadline for applications is soon!
Aidan and Roger attended the Nokia Data Challenge workshop at which the 20% best entries were presented for the Open Challenge and the Dedicated Challenges. They presented their Open Challenge entry with Jo entitled "Visual Analysis of Social networks in Space and Time" [paper | video] which was awarded third prize. The work uses visual analytics to study social ties between participants and explores how these are embedded in time and space. The workshop was attended by 50 people, showcased interesting work and resulted in discussion about issues relating to privacy, data collection, sample sizes, practical uses of such data and how challenges such as this should be run in future.
We've just embarked on a project with Middlesex University and Loughborough University to develop methods for Data Intensive Visual Analytics (DIVA), funded by EPSRC and DSTL. The project investigates visual approaches for understanding and communicating dynamic, uncertain and frequently conflicting data that are derived from numerous sources. We will develop methods for storing, communicating and utilising metadata about the data themselves and the processes used in their analysis and interpretation, focussing on issues such as data origin, data quality and analytical process. The methods will be applicable to domains that rely upon data intensive systems.
Iain recently returned from EuroVA, the third international workshop on Visual Analytics, which took place prior to EuroVis in Vienna, Austria. He presented his poster "Exploring Patterns of Uncertainty in Crowdsourced Crisis Information", part of his ongoing research into data that are increasingly used in response to crisis events such as natural disasters and civil conflicts.
Jo and Aidan attended a workshop about visualising migration data in Einsiedeln near Zurich, Switzerland. It was organised by the Geography Department at the University of Zurich to bring researchers together from different disciplines, produce immediate outputs and discuss further collaboration. Outputs included a global county-to-country migration map, county-county migration in the Republic of Ireland, demographic data for migrants in Nepal and Kyrgyzstan, internal migration in the Ivory coast and nomad movement and polio outbreaks in Chad.
Roger attended an Innovation Day as part of the Digital Shoreditch Festival. There was lots of discussion and great example of universities working collaboratively with industry. Roger and Audrey from TfL spoke about working with customer data from the London Barclays bike share scheme.
Aidan was invited to talk about visualising geodemographic data at the Launch of UCL's Crime, Policing and Citizenship project. Sessions included contributions about "Citizens and Identities", "Intelligent Policing and Crime Prevention" and "Spatio-Temporal Data Mining and Network Complexity".
Alex, Roger and Iain have recently returned from a workshop on Processing, Analysis and Visualization of Tracking Data (ProAnVis) at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. This three-day event brought together senior and junior researchers to explore how people traverse urban areas, specifically Rotterdam over three days in May, using visual analytics, data mining and GISc tools.
Jason, Sarah and Iain participated at the GIS Research UK 20th Annual Conference (GISRUK 2012) at Lancaster University.
Sarah’s poster - Geovisualization of Household Energy Consumption Characteristics - won Best Poster.
Iain's paper was entitled Characterising Locality Descriptions in Crowdsourced Crisis Information.
Aidan participated in the MOVE meeting at Delft University of Technology along with researchers from across Europe with interests and different expertises in handling and analysing movement data. He presented the user-centred approach used in his Short Term Scientific Mission to Amsterdam last May. He also attended the pre-meeting workshop Urbanism on Track and presented his interactive graphics for exploring a dataset of human movements by different groups of people.
Aidan attended a Willis Research Network meeting on global flood and windstorm risk modelling, at which we discussed the research needs of the insurance industry. This culminated in a half-day seminar attended by over 200 participants from the insurance market. We have been a member of the Willis Research Network for four years, applying information visualisation to exploratory data analysis and risk communication.
Jason Dykes gave a seminar showcasing giCentre applications and approaches at Oxford University. "Exploring the (geo)Visualization Design Space" used giCentre software including  placeSurvey, csrNet, bikeGrid and HiDE to introduce some of our applied and theoretical contributions to visualization. Jason spent time with Min Chen and his group at the Oxford e-Research Centre discussing visualization approaches and applications.
We helped Leicestershire County Council collect over 3000 public views on the green spaces in Leicestershire.
The results are now in. You can explore them with our interactive map. Browse people's comments by area, by type of green space or by keyword and find out why citizens value their green spaces.
Jason Dykes gave a Kartographischen Kolloquium at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences.
The talk was on the invitation of the G(V)ISR group.
Jason presented a series of giCentre ideas and applications including: placeSurvey; csrNet; bikeGrid and HiDE.
Jason Dykes attended two days of the recent JISC meeting at Ravensbourne College as a member of the GeoSpatial Working Group.
JISCgeo projects and products were reviewed and priorities identified for future funding calls.
Ravensbourne is a spectacular and inspiring building - a good place to establish needs and discuss strategy.
Gennady Andrienko and Jason Dykes represented the GeoVisualization Commission at a meeting of ICA Commission Chairs.
The event at TU Wien enabled the ICA to identify priorities and chairs to discuss inter-Commission activities.
Vienna was cold, but lovely. We hope there will be some co-Commission events shortly.
Aidan attended the Science of Risk conference at Lloyd's of London at which the Lloyd's Research Prize winners were announced. The Research Prize rewards existing published research with relevance to the insurance industry in five categories: natural hazards, climate change, biological and technological risks, behavioural risks and insurance operations and markets. Aidan's entry for work with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at Reading University was shortlisted for the natural hazards category.
The giCentre was well-represented at VisWeek in Rhode Island this year, with attendance and participation from Jo Wood, Jason Dykes, Aidan Slingsby, David Lloyd, Donia Badawood and Iain Dillingham. Jason was an InfoVis Poster Chair and Jo was a VAST Poster Chair. David, Jo and Aidan presented InfoVis papers that appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(12), Jo's coauthor presented a VAST paper and Iain presented a VAST poster.
Aidan, Jo and Jason gave a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
giCentre ideas and approaches were demonstrated in a presentation visualization methods and projects at the MIT SENSEable City Lab.
It was good to see some of the high impact visualization undertaken at MIT, to discuss visualization possibilities and priorities with SENSEable City and to call in on the MIT Media Lab.
Jo Wood presented BallotMaps: Detecting name bias in alphabetically ordered ballot papers at InfoVis in October 2011. The joint work with Donia Badawood, Jason Dykes and Aidan Slingsby is based on Donia's MSc project and it uses HiDE to produce graphics that show how the voting bias varies geographically and by party. The paper is published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(12), pp. 2384-2391.
Aidan Slingsby presented Exploring Uncertainty in Geodemographics with Interactive Graphics at InfoVis in October 2011. This joint work with Jason Dykes and Jo Wood designed visual and interactive techniques for exploring uncertainty within OAC (a geodemographic classifier) and then looked at the impact of providing this to expert users of OAC in a local authority. The paper is published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(12), pp2545-54.
David Lloyd presented Human-Centered Approaches in Geovisualization Design: Investigating Multiple Methods Through a Long-Term Case Study at InfoVis in October 2011. This joint work with Jason Dykes is based on David's PhD. The paper is published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(12), pp. 2498-2507.
Aidan presented our OAC Explorer work as part of UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis' seminar series. The work allows the classification uncertainty in a geodemographic classifier to be explored. The talk described the rationale behind the design decisions, highlighted some of the findings and described a small study assessing the impact of this upon users.
He will also present this material at the InfoVis conference at Visweek, held in Rhode Island at the end of October.
Much of the giCentre work is now available through City's excellent Open Access Institutional Repository.
We'll continue to ensure that giCentre work is made available through the repository prior to publication.
Jason, Jo, Aidan, Ali and Iain participated in the Visual Analytics workshop, which was held at UCL in September. Jason talked about our approach to visual analytics and how we embed cartographic design theory and experience into our designs. Jo spoke about our approach to tackling the VAST Challenges over the past three years. Jason and Aidan demonstrated placeSurvey and OAC Explorer at the lunchtime sessions.
Our paper "Exploring Uncertainty in Geodemographics with Interactive Graphics" has been accepted at InfoVis.
The work - based on OAC Explorer - uses interactive visualisation to allow users to delve into a geodemographic classifier (OAC) to study uncertainty and the original data that drives the classifier, spatially and by category. We looked at the impact of providing expert users with the means to explore uncertainty in a classifier they already knew well.
The paper will be presented at VisWeek in October and will appear in IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics 17(6). See our video for more information.
Jason Dykes was invited to give a seminar at the National Centre for GeoComputation in Maynooth, Ireland.
Jason spent time with Urska Demsar and her colleagues Tommy Burke and Peter Foley.
Their excellent geographically weighted visualization is making good use of giCentreUtils.
David Lloyd's paper 'Human-Centered Approaches in Geovisualization Design: Investigating Multiple Methods Through a Long-Term Case Study' has been accepted for IEEE Information Visualization 2011.
The paper draws upon work conducted over more than 3 years as part of David's EPSRC funded industrial CASE studentship with Leicestershire County Council. David received his PhD from City last year.
The work will be presented at the meeting in Rhode Island this autumn and will appear in IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics 17(6).
Susanne was awarded a PhD in Geographic Information Science for her thesis "Evaluating the Appropriateness of Visually Combining Quantitative Data Representations with 3D Desktop Virtual Environments Using Mixed Methods".
She successfully defended the thesis in an examination by Prof. Menno-Jan Kraak of ITC, the Netherlands and Dr. Aidan Slingsby of the giCentre who accepted the thesis without corrections.
Susanne has completed her PhD as a part-time distance learner in 5 years whilst working at FNHW in Switzerland. We celebrated with a picnic from Gail’s in Spa Fields
Jason and Ali attended the 25th International Cartographic Conference in Paris.
The bi-annual meeting of the ICA deals with cartography in its widest contexts with maps for children, analysis of historical maps and the latest in digital methods.
Jason chaired two sessions on geovisualization and hosted a geovisualization commission meeting. Both appear on the ICC Video on YouTube.
Jason Dykes, Aidan Slingsby, Susanne Bleisch and Ali Ramathan participated in the ICA Commission on GeoVisualization workshop on Persistent Problems in GeoVisualization.
The workshop was in part a retrospective on the 16 years of commission activity and partly an introduction to some excellent new ideas from a series of new faces.
This lively and stimulating event was hosted by the Institute de Geographie at La Sorbonne and included a picnic lunch in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Jo Wood, Aidan Slingsby and Jason Dykes participated in a Lorentz Center meeting on the Analysis and Visualization of Moving Objects.
Jo gave a keynote on visualizing movement in space and time, and Aidan presented analytical visualization software developed following his recent scientific mission to the University of Amsterdam.
The meeting in Leiden was organised through the EU COST funded MOVE programme and includes computer scientists, geographers and movement ecologists as they try to make sense of data sets collected from animal borne sensors. We used the Lorentz Center bikes to collect gps tracks and discuss goose migration and the scale dependencies associated with velocity measurement from tracks of irregular temporal precision - and to see the lovely dunes south of Katwijk.
Jason was at Visualizing Europe in Brussels.
There was plenty of excitement about visualization going mainstream: some new ideas, some old ideas, some good ideas, some crazy ideas, some bad ideas all dicsussed through an interesting tweet stream!
What seems certain is that visualization has significant potential, real momentum and commercial backing. Interesting times lie ahead.
Aidan participated in EuroVis and the EuroVA workshop in Bergen, Norway and presented HiDE as an interactive demo in the poster session [abstract]. A variety of interesting papers on various topics were presented in this year's spectacular setting, including visualisation and analysis of spatiotemporal data, documents, flows, networks, biological data and parameter spaces.
Aidan spent two weeks at the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam, with a group who track birds with GPS devices to better understand their behaviour and ecology. We designed, implemented and are evaluating novel techniques for visually analysing birds' movement, using a user-centred approach that focused on the ability to answer specific research questions previously difficult to investigate. The trip was funded by the EU COST-MOVE action in which we participate.
Jason Dykes is participating in the CHI 2011 Workshop on Analytic Provenance.
The meeting, in Vancouver, involves identifying the state of the art and establishing a research agenda for supporting documentation and description of process in the use of visual analytics
Jason is presenting a paper written Jo and Aidan in British Columbia. It describes the recent JISC funded vizTweets work and is entitled Sharing Graphics and Insights with Microblogs.
Ali Ramathan and Donia Badawood presented papers at GISRUK 2011 in Portsmouth describing the results of experimental and exploratory analytical work.
Iain Dillingham and Jason Dykes presented posters showcasing our use of Processing and the HiDE application respectively.
The highlight of the meeting was an amazing conference dinner on board HMS Warrior where conference participants were served on the gun deck!
Aidan attended the European Geophysical Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, contributing two posters.
"Browsing large natural hazard event sets" [abstract] showed how interactive visualisation is helping climate scientists validate their model outputs and communicate potential impacts of to the insurance industry.
"Sharing insights on the impact of natural disasters on Twitter" [abstract | poster] reported on our experiment in which we providing access to a dataset on the impacts of natural disasters to readers of earthquake.com through HiDE, and asked them to tweet their findings.
We have released a new version of HiDE that now supports 2D plots, has an applet version that runs from within a web browser and has a number of enhancements and bug-fixes.
Jason, Jo, Aidan, Ali and Iain attended the GeoViz workshop at which work was presented that linked computational methods with interactive maps and cartographic techniques.
Jo presented our work on visualizing bicycle hire model distributions and Aidan presented our work on designing interactive graphics for validating and interpreting storm track model outputs. We also presented two posters at the poster (p)recycling session, one about the use of spatial treemaps and OD maps by Leicestershire county council and one on vizTweets in which we demonstrate how visualisations can be shared through Twitter using HiDE. Both posters were originally presented at VisWeek 2010
We are providing HiDE along with a dataset of socio-economic losses to users of the earthquake-report website and asking them to explore the data using HiDE, tweet their findings and then to complete a questionnaire afterwards.
Details are here - please help spread the word and have a go yourself!
We will report the findings from this at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in April.
Jason Dykes is involved in organizing the GeoViz Hamburg meeting in March 2011 and the giCentre will be presenting two papers.
The meeting of the ICA Commission on Geovisualization will showcase research that links computational methods with interactive maps and cartographic techniques to analyse information involving measurements made in space and time.
We'll be using a rapid-reporting approach with more than 40 pieces of work presented at a two-day meeting with plenty of breaks for discussion. This worked well at the 2009 GeoViz meeting. A new addition this year is our poster (p)recycling event where posters old and new will be reused to widely communicate work that is being or has been presented at other fora.
giCentre work with Leicestershire County Council on the Place Survey featured in a discussion regarding open data in Government Computing section of The Guardian.
In the piece Robert Radburn of LCC draws attention to the need to make data usable through effective visualization as well as accessible.
The PlaceSurvey application is one of a number of pieces of work we have done with LCC to visualize local authority data.
We were pleased hear that two of our maps (Treemap Cartography for showing Spatial and Temporal Traffic Patterns and Rectangular Hierarchical Cartograms for Socio-Economic Data) made it onto a shortlist of eight maps for consideration for the Journal and Maps' Best Map Award 2010. The award went to Donald Lafreniere for their meticulously researched and comprehensive historical atlas.
We have designed an interactive web-based mapping tool with Leicestershire County Council that allows the citizens of Leicestershire to identify green spaces in the county that they value. It is part of a public consultation exercise which aims to give local communities a greater say in planning decisions that affect their area.
Aidan has been awarded a Short Term Scientific Mission grant to spend two weeks at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. He will work with Emiel Van Loom and colleagues to help analyse their bird-tracking data, to help understand the nesting, feeding and migration behaviour of sea gulls. The grant was awarded by the COST MOVE Action - an EU-funded research network that aims facilitate collaboration between researchers across Europe, with an interest in analysing moving object data.
Aidan has been awarded a Short Term Scientific Mission grant to spend two weeks at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam in May. He will work with Emiel Van Loom and colleagues to help analyse their bird-tracking data, to help understand the nesting, feeding and migration behaviour of sea gulls. The grant was awarded by the COST MOVE Action - an EU-funded research network that aims facilitate collaboration between researchers across Europe, with an interest in analysing moving object data.
City University is offering up to 75 fully-funded studentships for Doctoral research to begin in October 2011 - http://www.city.ac.uk/research/resdegrees/studentships.html
We're keen to invite, discuss and develop proposals with good candidates prior to the University deadline - to strengthen applications prior to submission.
Draft proposals received by the 14th January 2011 will receive feedback from the giCentre team that should help develop applications by the University deadline of the 31st January 2011.
We've released HiDE - Open-Source Software that lets you build information graphics from data and tweet them.
Data can be explored by changing the mapping of data variables to visual channels - such as size, order and colour.
We include some example datasets for you to experiment with: US election data, EU energy usage and OAC (UK geodemographics).
We also provide documentation to help you to load, visualize and use your own data.
Jason Dykes is one of the editorial team to have produced a special issue of the Journal of Location Based Services.
The journal contains articles that address research issues in GeoVA(t) - geo-spatial visual analytics with a focus on time.
These papers are based upon work on this theme presented at the ICA Commission on GeoVisualization workshop in Guimarães.
Our work on mapping Britain's Seven Social Tribes features in the Technology Telegraph's Best of the Web feature on Data Visualization.
The maps show OAC, the Output Area Classifier, for all unit postcodes in the UK.
Spatial Treemaps show the postcode hierarchy and the geography concurrently.
Aidan Slingsby represented the giCentre at the EuroStat HackDay.
Our Hierarchical Data Explorer was used to analyse European Energy Efficiency data.
The event is reported on the Open Knowledge Foundation and features on Infosthetics.com and in The Guardian Data Blog.
Our graphical interface shows how satisfied the citizens of Leicestershire are with where they live. The data are from a survey carried out by the council (in common with other councils). Usually, results are presented in highly aggregate forms, but our applet shows how this varies by place and personal characteristics and tries to strike a balance between data exploration potential and simpilicity of use. It was designed in collaboration with Leicestershire County Council, was funded by Communities and Local Government and was recently featured on the Information Aesthetics blog.
Aidan Slingsby participated in a week-long workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl. The workshop brought together geographers, computational geometrists and applied domain experts together to discuss issues relating to handing and analysing data about moving objects. The presence of domain experts with data and questions of their data, combined with the broad range of expertise represented, was inspiring and has provided new collaboration opportunities.
Aidan won one of the 5 Staff Research Prizes that were awarded by the University this year. The prize was for his work with the National Centre of Atmospheric Science that resulted in a high profile award, publicity for the university and opportunities for further collaboration.
Aidan Slingsby and Jo Wood attended the AGI's annual dinner in London to receive their award for the best paper at GISRUK 2010.
The paper - coauthored with Jason Dykes and Robert Radburn - demonstrated the use of interactive visualisation to explore multivariate socioeconomic population characteristics.
More details are available on our website. See the demographics of your own postcode here.
Jason Dykes and Jo Wood participated in Dagstuhl Seminar 10461 - Schematization in Cartography, Visualization and Computational Geometry.
The seminar was organized to bring together researchers in academia and industry to develop cross disciplinary collaboration, establish research needs and identify and discuss open problems.
Jason co-organized the seminar with Matthias Müller-Hannemann of Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg and Alexander Wolff of the Universität of Würzburg.
We've just returned from a successful week at IEEE VisWeek in Salt Lake City, at which we won 4 awards.
Jason presented our paper "Rethinking Map Legends with Visualization" which won an Honorable Mention. He was also a panelist in the panel that was awarded Best Panel at VisWeek. Jo led our VAST challenge entry which won an award for "good overall design and analysis". Aidan led the Discovery Exhibit "Making Hurricane Tracks Accessible" (work in collaboration with the National Centre of Climate Science and the Willis Research Network) which won the Discovery Exhibition Award. Jo presented the Discovery Exhibit "Using Spatial Tree Maps in Local Authority Decision Making and Reporting" (an entry led by Robert Radburn at Leicestershire County Council). We also presented our vizTweets poster [see poster].
Videos of some of these entries are on our Vimeo channel.
Our paper "Rethinking Map Legends with Visualization" received an Honorable Mention at the IEEE InfoVis Conference at VisWeek. The paper provides guidance for creating map legends for dynamic maps, based on cartographic and information visualisation literature and some workshops that we ran with EDINA. We built a number of prototypes to illustrate our guidelines, which are demonstrated in our video.
The paper is published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 16(6), pp890-899, 2010
See some of our latest work on our Vimeo channel.
Jason Dykes has edited a special issue of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.
The contributions were presented at and developed subsequent to the Geospatial Visual Analytics: Focus on Time meeting in Guimaraes, Portugal earlier this year.
The special issue was lead by Gennady Andrienko through the International Cartographic Association Commission on GeoVisualization.
Our joint work with climate scientists at the National Centre for Climate Science at Reading University has won the Discovery Exhibition Award at VisWeek 2010 for our entry "Making Hurricane Track Data Accessible".
The Discovery Exhibition showcases tangible impacts of visualization. We describe how we are helping climate scientists validate their model of simulated storm tracks, generate research questions and disseminate this knowledge.
The work was undertaken with the support of the Willis Research Network.
Jason Dykes has edited a special issue of Computers Environment and Urban Systems on GeoVisualization and the Digital City - issue 34(6) - November 2010.
The journal has been produced on behalf of the ICA Commission on GeoVisualization as a result of the GeoViz Hamburg meeting in 2009. It contains six papers in which various novel technologies and approaches are described, demonstrated and evaluated.
The CEUS special issue contains an editorial by Jason and is one of three special issues produced by the commission this year. It is one of the first editions of CEUS to contain multimedia supplements that showcase the science. Pre-prints of many of the papers are available on the journal website.
The giCentre won a VAST Challenge award for "good overall design and analysis", for their analytical visualisation of data relating to a virus pandemic (spatio-temporal spread and mutation).
The annual VAST (Visual Analytics in Science and Technology) challenge provides a large simulated but realistic dataset (usually relating to issues of national security) and challenges participants to interpret the data using visual analytics.
Our work with the Willis Research Network on Visualizing Hurricane Tracks was featured on the VisMaster website recently.
VisMaster is a European Network of Visual Analytics researchers in which the giCentre participates.
The work will be showcased in the VisWeek Discovery Exhibition, and our online Discovery Exhibition entry summarises the work with text, images and video.
The giCentre has released a library of classes for writing data visualization programs with the software Processing. Includes classes for statistical graphics, colour management, animated transitions and geographic transformations. The utilities are fully documented with examples and are open source. See gicentre.org/utils.
A new application written by the giCentre uses live data from the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme to reveal patterns in docking station use across London. It uses spatial treemaps to show the last 24 hours use of all London docking stations in a grid. To use the BikeGrid application, go to gicentre.org/bikegrid.
Our new paper in the Journal of Maps describes how we've added geography to treemaps in order to represent spatial hierarchical data and how this results in a hierarchical rectangular cartogram. We demonstrate the value of these for socio-economic data for more than a million postcode units. For more information about our related work, click here.
Our graphs of the new London bike hire scheme show the availability of bikes over the last 24 hours for over 300 docking stations and allow comparision with yesterday's usage. Sort docking stations by distance from the station of your choice and explore patterns of use through time; for example, which times of day docking stations are popular destinations or where and when it is difficult to find a bike to hire.
Aidan presented visual analysis techniques for comparing catastrophe (CAT) model outputs at the Ninth International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at Leicester University in July. This was joint work with Willis as part of the Willis Research Network.
Christos has successfully defended his thesis "Evaluating Non-Photorealistic Rendering for 3D Urban Models in the Context of Mobile Navigation". We're pleased to say that Prof. Jonathan Briggs awarded the PhD with no corrections.
Christos' work was undertaken through a EPSRC Industrial CASE award with Alcatel Lucent Telecom Limited UK with Dr. Vesna Brujic-Okretic.
Christos is now a Lecturer in Media Techology at Bournemouth University and maintains a log of his activities through a scientific diary.
The ESRC has put together a press release describing the UPTAP Fellowship that it funded.
Our vizLib activities with Leicestershire County Council came out of this work.
The press release was taken up by a number of specialist media outlets including Scientific Computing, Politics and Science Daily.
The results of our vizLib project are published in a short graphical report as part of the UPTAP Research Findings series.
In 'Developing Capacity for Exploratory Analysis in Local Government Visualization of Library Usage Data' we present a number of graphical methods and comment on library user characteristics and geography for libraries in Leicestershire.
Variable 'performance' in terms of user recency and frequency is evident along with differing local patterns of usage. The importance of the geography of library location amongst frequent recent users is evident.
Our paper on OD maps has just been published in the Cartographic Journal. It describes our new technique for visualising origin and destination data that avoids some of the problems of other techniques, such as occlusion. We do this nesting spatially arranged destination matrices inside origin matricies to produce an OD map. This technique is similar to that of an OD matrix but with the spatial arrangement of origins and destinations preserved. This work is based on the award-winning paper that Jo presented at GISRUK last year.
Jason Dykes attended the Dagstuhl Seminar on Information Visualization.
The meeting provided a great opportunity to discuss giCentre work with international colleagues in the context of the latest advances and ideas in Information Visualization.
Jason participated in research groups working on 'The Analytic Process' and 'Visualization Aesthetics' and led a session on 'Information Visualization Education'. He is contributing to ongoing efforts to develop the ideas generated at the meeting.
Aidan, Jo and Jason's paper which demonstrates a treemap-based approach to cartography for presenting spatial and temporal characteristics of traffic has just been published in the Journal of Maps. It enables multiple aspects of traffic to be viewed concurrently. We also have an interactive demo of the technique.
Dr. David Lloyd graduated on 18 May 2010 in a ceremony at the Guildhall.
David's comprehensive piece of work details ways in which various human-centred methods can be used in establishing communication between data experts and visual methods experts to foster co-discovery through long-term collaboration. David's work was EPSRC funded and is part of an on-going successful relationship with Leicestershire County Council.
The thesis can be downloaded from the giCentre publication pages: Lloyd (2009) Evaluating Human-Centered Approaches for Geovisualization.
Aidan presented our vizTweets project for collaborative visual data analysis at the European Geophysical Union General Assembly 2010 in Vienna. We are extending our Hierarchical Visualisation Expression (HiVE) language to support the types of graphics used in insurance natural hazard risk management. Aidan demonstrated how HiVE could be used with microblogging sites to discuss data asynchronously, using graphics.
The giCentre won best paper at GIS Research UK 18th Annual Conference (GISRUK) for the fourth year running. Aidan presented OAC Explorer [see paper], demonstrating techniques for visually analysing uncertainty and variation within the OAC geodemographic classifier through a fast and responsive visual interface that makes effective use of interaction, layout and colour. Thank you to everyone who voted!
The giCentre won the UKMap challenge at GISRUK. The challenge was to demonstrate an "innovative way in which UKMap [could] be used and displayed for the potential benefit of a specific market sector, organisation or research area". Our entry responded to this by applying some ideas from our vizLegends work with EDINA to produce a responsive map legend to support map interpretation in an interactive environment. You can try it out here.
The giCentre was well-represented at the UK's annual GIS research conference, presenting a wide cross-section of its work. Susanne and David contributed to the pre-conference useability workshop that was also attended by Jason and Lian-Chee; Naz represented work on uncertainty in home locations from volunteered geographic information [pdf]; Jo and Aidan presented work on looking at uncertainty within OAC [pdf and pdf]; Jason presented new ways thinking about map legends [pdf]; Rob showcased the vizLib work and described how it was having an impact in Leicestershire County Council [pdf]; and Aidan led the giCentre UKMap challenge entry.
David Lloyd recently submitted his PhD to the satisfaction of the examiners - well done David!
This comprehensive piece of work describes an intensive and long-term collaboration with Leicestershire County Council and details the ways in which various human-centred methods for establishing communication between data experts and visual methods experts can be used to foster co-discovery.
The thesis can be downloaded from the giCentre publication pages: Lloyd (2009) Evaluating Human-Centered Approaches for Geovisualization.
Anna Broberg of Aalto University, Helsinki is visiting the giCentre to discuss her work on the analysis of softGIS data and visualization methods to support this activity.
Anna is participating in the MSc GeoVizualization module and has presented some of her analysis of geo-referenced perceptions of Helsinki and Espoo, which we are analyzing according to the characteristics of those who register them.
The work is part of the Urban Happiness project, which has identified relationships between density of urban environment and registered response amongst some groups of respondents.
Anna-Lena Kornfeld of the g2Lab at HafenCity University Hamburg is visiting the giCentre to discuss her work on visual encodings to map sounds.
Anna presented her preliminary ideas and a proposed set of style guides for audio cartography at a giCentre seminar.
We have been discussing and developing these subsequently with Anna to develop her ideas, which promise effective means of mapping noise, soundscape and sound propagation in urban environments.
Jason Dykes and Robert Radburn delivered a seminar showcasing their vizLib work at Loughborough University Library.
The event aimed to communicate best practice in analysing and visualizing and included presentations by Paula Forster and Sharon Pye of Leicestershire County Council on innovative marketing and analytical methods being used in Leicestershire.
Library Services managers from across the country attended the seminar which included presentation of some of the techniques and findings developed by Rob and Jason through the ESRC funded UPTAP project.
Aidan, Jo and Jason attended the kick-off meeting for the JISC funded VRE Rapid Innovation programme at the University of London.
Jason presented a short introduction to the vizTweets a research project which is now underway.
The event was a useful showcase of VRE RI projects and formed part of JISC's dev8D developer days, which Aidan attended.
Aidan Slingsby and Jason Dykes visited the Interaction Design Centre at Middlesex University.
They presented developing giCentre ideas on Spatial Interaction Design with a series of applications, prototypes and guiding principles.
Following the seminar the UK Visual Analytics scene and visualization education were discussed with Prof. William Wong and colleagues at Middlesex.
giCentre reseachers have had five papers accepted for the GIS Research UK 18th Annual Conference which will be held at UCL in April: two on visualising the OAC geodemographic classifier [pdf and pdf]), innovative map legends [pdf], visual analysis of library use [pdf] and uncertainty in home locations from volunteered geographical information [pdf] .
Aidan Slingsby and Jason Dykes attended the Willis Research Network's quarterly meeting in London.
Aidan presented recent giCentre work and Jason and Aidan participated in a series of meetings with other WRN members, some of the world's largest insurers/reinsurers, catastrophe modelling companies and spatial data providers.
Various key issues were discussed and research opportunities identified relating to the role of spatial data and data visualisation in the insurance industry.
On 21 Jan 2010 Jonathan Raper and David Mountain played host to Geomob - the London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group - at City University.
Speakers included Andrew Eland of Google UK's Mobile Team, Julianne Pearce of Blast Theory, Laurence Penney discussing SnapMap and Andy Walker of Public Earth.
The final talk was given by Mikel Maron discussing OpenStreetMap's Response to the Haiti Earthquake.
Jo Wood, Jason Dykes and Aidan Slingsby's research has been recognised in the university's annual Staff Research Prize scheme. They received a "commendation" for their novel approaches to information visualisation, their engagement with data users and their research outputs over the past year which include best paper (GISRUK), honorable mention (IEEE InfoVis), visual analytics prize (VAST) and "KML in research" prize (Google).
Jonathan Raper chaired the launch of the London Datastore through which huge quantities of previously unavailable data about London is being made available to the public.
A number of high profile speakers contributed to the event at City Hall including Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) and Aneesh Chopra (Chief Technology Officer of the United States).
The giCentre team has been awarded funding by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under their VRE Rapid Innovation (VRERI) Grant scheme.
In the 'vizTweets' project we'll be developing the HiVE language in the context of various applications areas. We will also produce clients that can generate and interpret HiVE. Doing so will help researchers save and share visualization.
We will develop a means of communicating this information that draws upon and utilises existing microblogging infrastructures to develop a Virtual Research Environment.
Our work with Leicestershire County Council featured in issue 32 of 'E-Government Bulletin' under the title "Leicestershire Pioneers ‘Data Visualisation’ For Service Improvement".
The piece describes our 'vizLib' and ongoing 'Timely Information Pilots' projects with LCC. As Rob Radburn says: "How do you go about looking through 450,000 records?" Well - we developed some innovative and informed approaches with LCC analysts.
Lian-Chee Koh has joined the Department of Information Science as a research candidate.
She will be working in the giCentre with Aidan Slingsby and Jason Dykes in a project that applies user-centred design to develop data visualization methods and software.
Lian-Chee is based in Singapore where she is an instructor at the Singapore Management University and will be using the Singapore property market as a case study in the planned research.
Jo Wood and Aidan Slingsby attended the AGI annual Awards Dinner and were presented with the AGI Best of GISRUK Paper award for their paper with Jason Dykes and Robert Radburn on OD Maps. The paper was presented by Jo last April at GISRUK09 in Durham and they have just submitted a full paper based on this work that is now under review.
City University is currently offering 35 studentships for PhD research starting in October 2010.
We’d like strong applicants to apply to work with us in the giCentre.
The competitive application process requires the production of a short research proposal including objectives, likely methods and an indication of the contribution the work will make to the academic discipline.
If you are interested please contact us and we can discuss research ideas and help develop strong and coherent proposals.
Anna Broberg is visiting the giCentre from the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (YTK) at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK).
Anna is working on the Urban Happiness project, in which the eco-social sustainability of the urban environment is being determined by collecting and analysing experiential localized knowledge of the residents of six Finnish cities. These data are being generated online by city residents using softGIS methods.
Colleagues in the giCentre are working with Anna and her data on innovative ways of visually analysing the kinds of data generated through the softGIS approach.
giCentre researchers recently completed the vizLegends consultancy with EDINA - the JISC national academic data centre in Edinburgh. Five 'digital wireframes' have been produced to explore a number of themes that relate to the use of visualization in re-thinking approaches to map legends.
Jason Dykes, Aidan Slingsby and Jo Wood delivered a seminar on the project and current hot topics in Information Visualization to EDINA at the finale project meeting.
The vizLegends digital wireframes are likely to be evaluated by the EDINA user community and will feed into requirements for future EDINA Digimap products.
Jason Dykes has been invited to participate in the world's first GeoDesign Summit in California in the New Year.
The event aims to shape 'GeoDesign' - an approach to planning that combines spatial thinking, computational approaches and creativity to improve the way the built environment is designed. Academics and practitioners from a broad set of disciplinary backgrounds will discuss and demonstrate approaches that may result in synergies.
The meeting will consist of invited keynote speakers, lightning talks, and idea labs and materials will be developed at the meeting to advance the concept of GeoDesign and published subsequently online.
Aidan Slingsby participated in the third annual Willis Research Network Reinsurers' meeting in Bermuda (2-3 Nov) in which researchers from the Willis Research Network presented their work to some of the world's largest reinsurance companies. These were followed-up with in-depth meetings with each of the organisations, discussing research directions and how the research could be operationalised.
Aidan presented recent giCentre information visualisation research, discussed its relevance to the industry and how it could be developed further to better meet the needs of the insurance and reinsurance industry.
Jason Dykes has been asked to join the organizing committee of the IEEE Information Visualization Conference 2010.
InfoVis is the premier meeting in the field of information visualization and the meeting, which is a key part of VisWeek, includes high quality papers, posters, tutorials, workshops, panels and exhibits. Accepted papers are published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
Jason will be acting as posters co-chair with Chris Weaver of Oklahoma University for the meeting which will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah in October 2010.
Jason Dykes is acting as a member of the Programme Committee for IEEE Pacific Visualization 2010.
This involves reviewing papers, eliciting and collating reviews from colleagues in the visualization community and advising the paper chairs on recommendations based upon the received reviews.
The third PacVis meeting will be held in Taipei, Taiwan in March 2010.
Aidan presented our paper at IEEE InfoVis and demonstrated the use of HiVE to describe, communicate and restore hierarchically configured graphics.
We received an Honorable Mention for the paper "Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions" which is accompanied by a video showing the notation in action.
We have been discussing the approach and the OD Maps that it supports with a number of delegates at the meeting.
The paper is published in Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 15 (6) (Nov/Dec 2009) [pdf].
We ran a half day tutorial at visWeek 2009 in Atlantic City. The materials and software are available online and enable you to explore the visual design process.
About 70 delegates attended the tutorial and we've received really useful positive feedback on the event.
Jason Dykes chaired the session on 'Space and Time' at IEEE InfoVis 09.
The session contained novel analytical visualization of spatial and temporal data sets relating to aircraft locations, travel booking transactions, large scale migration data and medical records and an evaluation of responses to alternative representations of point patterns.
The InfoVis meeting was held in Bally's Hotel and Casino, Atlantic City, New Jersey and formed a key component of VisWeek 2009.
We've released the HiDE visualization software as part of our VisWeek 2009 tutorial.
You can use HiDE to explore some of the design parameters associated with hierarchical visualization. It's highly interactive and responsive software that lets you explore layouts and choose colours in the context of a data set recording the results of eight US elections.
The software implements our HiVE expression language for hierarchical layouts and provides additional features for visualization design.
David Lloyd, Robert Radburn and Jason Dykes presented a paper at the ReVISE 09 workshop during VisWeek in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The presentation entitled "Evaluating human-centred approaches to geovisualization application development" documented the results of the work that David is leading on geovisualization design in Leicestershire County Council.
We proposed recommendations to guide the use of human centred approaches in the geovisualization domain in terms of: context of use, requirements, designing, prototyping and prioritizing developments. Our approaches involve continually Refactoring Visualization from Experience with subject experts as 'co-developers'.
Jason Dykes chaired the Spatio-Temporal Analytics session at the VAST Symposium during VisWeek 2009.
The session contained six papers in which novel and varied visualization techniques were used to analyse traffic flows to establish viable commuter routes, locations of employees within a building evacuation, multivariate data concerning hurricane trends, medical records, radio frequency fingerprints for georeferencing and mobile phone networks.
Jason serves on the IEEE VAST programme committee.
Jo, Aidan, David, Naz and Jason won an award at the 2009 IEEE VAST challenge during VisWeek 2009 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Here Jo is receiving the award from VAST Challenge Chair, Catharine Plaisant of the University of Maryland.
We won the award for good visualization of uncertainty and analysis of geographical data in the Flitter Mini Challenge, which involved graphically analysing a data set that simulated suspicious behaviour in a highly connected social network.
Jason Dykes has been appointed to the Regeneration and Economic Development Analysis (REDA) Expert Panel.
The panel has been convened by the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) to strengthen the links between research, evidence and policy. This will be achieved through closer liaison with senior academics and researchers from a range of disciplines through the panel as CLG develops its analytical capacity.
Jason has a geovisualization remit on the panel and will advise on issues relating to graphical approaches for data exploration and communication.
Congratulations to David LLoyd who recently submitted his PhD thesis.
David has been working on 'Evaluating Human-Centred Approaches for GeoVisualization' with Leicestershire County Council through an EPSRC-funded Industrial CASE studentship over the last four years.
He will be defending the work at a viva voce examination in the new year.
Aidan Slingsby will be speaking at the Developments in Geodemographic Visualisation workshop on 15th September at the Royal Statistical Society. He will present giCentre work on rectangular hierarchical cartograms for national maps of population classified by OAC category. More information about the event and details about how to register are here.
Aidan has put together an interactive demo that can be used to explore traffic volume and average speed of courier vehicles in central London. It accompanies a recent submission by Aidan Slingsby, Jo Wood and Jason Dykes to the Journal of Maps (under review) in which we describe the use of treemaps in cartography using eCourier traffic data in London as a case study.
Aidan, Jason and Jo have received an Honorable Mention for their paper at the annual IEEE Information Visualization Conference - the World’s premier meeting in Information Visualization. This is the third year in succession that the giCentre has had work accepted and the paper is one of 5 to receive an award at this year's meeting.
The work introduces and describes the HiVE notation and will be presented in October in Atlantic City, New Jersey. We have produced a short video to demonstrate. The paper will appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 15 (6).
A 'possibilities report' and four 'digital wireframes' were presented to EDINA in Edinburgh through the vizLegends project.
The giCentre is using its expertise in visualization to design prototype map legends that act as exploratory interfaces to maps produced using Digimap datasets.
Our four examples demonstrate and explore possibilities for dynamic and data-dense legends for maps through the following themes: 'The Map is The Legend', 'The Legend as a Bar Chart', The Legend as a Matrix Plot', 'The Legend as Hierarchy'.
giCentre researchers met with the Digimap GeoServices team for the second of three meetings spanning the vizLegends project.
The project is exploring visualization interfaces to map legends and we delivered and discussed four highly interactive digital wireframes that we have developed as part of the 'imagination exercise' at the meeting. We also saw the new Digimap client and discussed its various features.
The digital wireframes will be further evaluated by EDINA and developed by the giCentre when requirements are prioritised.
The giCentre team has won an award for 'Good Visualization of Uncertainty and Geographical Data' at the IEEE VAST Challenge 2009. Competing against an international field including large research groups and commercial software vendors, the team developed several applications for exploring the geography of social networks.
The judges commented that the entry was one of the few able to show uncertainty and showed skills in geospatial analysis.
Susanne Bleisch and Jason Dykes have had a paper accepted for presentation at the INTERACT'09 workshop on "Human Aspects of Visualization".
The paper "A meta-framework of methodological approaches exemplified by 3D geovisualization research" reports upon an approach that combines methodological approaches that vary along a continuum from perceptual experiments to studies in applied settings as we try to understand use of geovisualization applications in analysis.
Susanne is a giCentre MSc graduate who studied as a distance learner.
She is developing the framework as part of her PhD at the giCentre.
Jason Dykes and Jo Wood have described their work with the geograph data set in a contribution to a new O'Reilly book Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions.
The chapter, entitled The Geographic Beauty of a Photographic Archive explores various aspects of the Geograph data set and its visualization.
Beautiful Data was released on 27th July 2009.
Aidan Slingsby, Jason Dykes and Jo Wood have a paper accepted at the IEEE Information Visualization conference to be held in October in Atlantic City.
"Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions" describes HiVE, a notation for exploring data through hierarchical layouts. A video shows the notation in action.
The paper will appear in Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 15 (6) (Nov/Dec 2009) [pdf].
This is the third year running that the giCentre team has had papers accepted at this prestigious conference with typical acceptance rates at around 30%.
Jo Wood is participating in the London-Edinburgh-London cycling endurance event from the 26th July. This event, held once every four years, attracts an international field of endurance cyclists. Jo will be using location-based technologies and innovative mapping techniques to report progress as he cycles over 200 miles per day over four days.
Jo Wood, Jason Dykes and Aidan Slingsbywill be delivering a new tutorial "Exploring Design Decisions for Effective Information Visualization" at IEEE VisWeek 2009.
The tutorial - to be run in Atlantic City, New Jersey in October - explores the use of colour, layout, symbolism and animation for good data visualisation design.
This is the third year running that the giCentre has run a tutorial for this prestigious event.
The giCentre Data Visualization Day MasterClass was held at City University London on 7 July 2009.
More than 40 delegates from across the country participated in the seminars and visualization workshop.
A series of methods and frameworks for using maps and graphics effectively in data analysis and communication were presented by giCentre researchers.
Alan Smith of the Office of National Statistics and Alistair Edwardes of Communities and Local Government contributed perspectives on the importance of visualization and its use in government in an enjoyable, informative and very graphical day.
The giCentre Data Visualization day was attended by delegates from across the country who participated in a day of active learning focussing on cutting edge methods of visualization.
Presentations from Alan Smith of ONS, Alisdair Edwardes of CLG and Rob Radburn of Leicestershire County Council were complimented by giCentre presentations on design guidelines and demos of the latest techniques and activities.
The giCentre is holding a 1 day Data Visualization MasterClass on 7 July 2009.
The day is designed for those using maps and graphics in data presentation and analysis. Core ideas in visualization will be identified with example applications and novel approaches introduced and discussed. Pragmatic advice will be provided on how to use visualization methods in practice.
Alan Smith of the Office of National Statistics and Alistair Edwardes of Communities and Local Government will be contributing perspectives. For more details and to book see http://gicentre.org/dataVizDay/.
The giCentre has been successfully awarded funding by the Department of Communities and Local Government to improve the information citizens receive about their local council services through their 'Timely Information' initiative.
The project, in partnership with Leicestershire County Council, will develop four visualization applications that will allow residents of Leicestershire to be better informed about the quality of local services, and to influence service provision.
Prof. Jonathan Raper contributed to an article in The Guardian reviewing developments in location technologies.
Jonathan commented on obstacles and likely developments as work continues to produce a the 'universal travel widget'.
You can read more about Jonathan's views in The Guardian, or talk to Jonathan and colleagues at our Masterclass on 'The Future of Location Technologies'.
Jason Dykes represented the giCentre at a meeting of the EU VisMaster working group on spatio-temporal aspects of Visual Analytics. VisMaster aims to forge a strong European Visual Analytics community to effectively utilise the immense wealth of data generated, acquired and stored by modern information systems by combining visual and computational methods. The group are producing a research agenda and developed scenarios key themes at the workshop in Warnemünde, Germany.
The giCentre is using expertise in visualization to develop exploratory visualization interfaces to map legends for the diverse collection of spatial data available through EDINA's Digimap service to the Higher and Further Education communities.
Novel digital wireframes are being produced to demonstrate possibilities for exploratory legends as interfaces to Carto and developing EDINA clients.
The work is being undertaken during the Summer of 2009 with a kick-off meeting in Edinburgh in May.
The GIS field trip takes place at the end of April in the English Lake District. Students are participating in data collection and analysis in projects that consider digital terrain models, geodemographics and landcover analysis through remote sensing.
The projects are developed by students in discussion with teaching staff. This year's elevation model project involved hiking up Long Crag with excellent views of Coniston Water.
The latest version of LandSerf has been released after extensive testing.
New features include the LandScript scripting language for macro programming and map algebra processing, flow magnitude calculations, new map projections, significantly enhanced Ordnance Survey NTF and MasterMap import and USB GPS communication.
The paper 'OD Maps for Exploring Spatial Trajectories' by Wood, Dykes, Slingsby and Radburn was awarded the AGI Best Paper at GISRUK 2009 in Durham.
The paper presents an innovative technique for viewing geographic vectors and was well received by the audience at the conference.
This is the third year running that the giCentre at City has won the best paper prize at the national GIS research conference.
Our entry to GISRUK's mashup challenge illustrated some different approaches to displaying point data as part of a mashup. This includes density surfaces, chi-expectation surfaces and tag maps. We used a gazetteer of British placenames classified by their prefix/suffix and their likely linguistic origin.
The conference was hosted by Durham University and the giCentre contributions were a nice mix of projects resulting from MSc dissertations, PhD research and funded projects.
StratAG is an Irish Research Cluster focusing on advanced geotechnologies for monitoring and early warning. Jason, Alan MacEachren (Penn State University) and Gennady Andrienko (Fraunhofer Institute) presented complimentary perspectives on geovisual analysis to kick-off the StratAG work on discovering knowledge in large complex data sets through interactive visual methods.
The giCentre featured in Insurance Day following our success in the Google KML in Research Competition.
We used KML in novel ways to represent variation in long term forecasts for South America in Google Earth.
The work was undertaken as part of our contribution to the Willis Research Network with David Stephenson and Rachel Lowe at Exeter University, Erik Andersson at ECMWF and the EUROBRISA project.
Lloyd, D., Dykes, J. and Radburn, R. 2009.
Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to prioritise candidate improvements to a geovisualization application Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK
Bleisch, S., Dykes, J. and Nebiker, S. 2009.
Building bridges between methodological approaches: a meta-framework linking experiments and applied studies in 3D geovisualization research Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK
Khalili,N., Wood, J. and Dykes, J. 2009.
Mapping the Geography of Social Networks Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK
Radburn, R., Dykes, J. and Wood, J. 2009.
vizLib: Developing Capacity for Exploratory Data Analysis in Local Government - Visualization of Library Customer Behaviour Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK
Slingsby, A., Lowe, R., Dykes, J., Stephenson, D., Wood, J, Jupp, T. 2009.
A Pilot Study for the Collaborative Development of New Ways of Visualising Seasonal Climate Forecasts. Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK
Wood, J., Dykes, J., Slingsby, A., Radburn, R. 2009.
Flow Trees for Exploring Spatial Trajectories Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK
Brown, D., Mountain, D. & Wood, J. 2009.
Automated and Subjective Terrain Feature Extraction: A Comparative Analysis. Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK
The paper summarised Delroy's MSc thesis, comparing the prominent terrain features (peaks, valleys, ridges, etc) pointed out by hikers in the Lake District, with those identified by feature extraction algorithms. Main conclusion: scale matters!
Use RAEViewer to explore the RAE Results and Funding through an interactive graphical representation of the 67 Units of Assessment. Institutions can be ordered according to the selectable criteria. City has improved its research ratings across the University following the publication of the 2008 RAE results, with over 80% of submitted activity rated as recognised internationally or better. Our visualization application helps identify trends in research quality and funding.