Aidan is a Research Fellow in the giCentre with a background in Geography and GIS. He is interested in the design and use of data visualisation for helping make sense of data, particularly those that are spatial and temporal.

His current research relates to spatial data analysis and data visualisation as part of the Willis Research Network who funds his position.

He holds a BSc (Hons) in Geology (Edinburgh), an MSc in GIS (Edinburgh) and a PhD in Geography (University College London).

Recent news

March 2012: I 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. I presented the user-centred approach used in my Short Term Scientific Mission to Amsterdam last May. I 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.

February 2012: I 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.

January 2012: We helped Leicestershire County Council collect over 3000 public views on the green spaces in Leicestershire. The results are now in and you can explore them with an interactive map. Browse people's commments by area, by type of green space or by keyword and find out why citizens value their green spaces.

November 2011: I 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. My entry for work with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at Reading University was shortlisted for the natural hazards category.

October 2011: I attended VisWeek and presented the InfoVis paper Exploring Uncertainty in Geodemographics with Interactive Graphics. 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.

October 2011: I 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.

September 2011: I attended the VAW2011 workshop at UCL, organised by UKVAC, a consortium of UK universities working on Visual Analytics. Jo and Jason gave a talk each. I demonstrated OAC Explorer which uses interestive visualisation to study uncertainty and other variation within a geodemographic classifier Jason demonstrated PlaceSurvey which presents the results of a survey on public satisfactory with their local area carried out by Leicestershire County Council.

See all news.

Some examples and demos

Video demos on the giCentre Vimeo Channel

HiDE, software that lets you build information graphics from data and tweet them.

London bike hire graphs: last 24 hours of usage compared to last week and for any day since mid-August

OAC maps: rectangular cartograms of UK demographics and separate maps for each postcode.

Place Survey: explore the Place Survey results for Leicestershire.

Responsive Legends for Aerial Photographs: demo of a map legend for an aerial photograph that is responsive to zoom/pan.

Tag map mashups: Mashups of point-based spatial data of British placenames

Seasonal climate forecasts: Climate forecast data in Google Earth (awarded a prize by Google):.

Exploring Design Decisions for Effective Information Visualization: tutorial with software.

Some recent publications

See the full list.

Slingsby, A., Dykes, J. and Wood, J. 2011. Exploring Uncertainty in Geodemographics with Interactive Graphics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(12), pp. 2384-2391 [paper]

Wood, J., Slingsby, A. and Dykes, J. 2011. Visualizing the dynamics of London’s bicycle hire scheme. Cartographica, 46(4), pp239-251. [paper]

Dykes, J., Wood, J. and Slingsby, A. 2010 Rethinking Map Legends with Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 16(6), pp890-899 [pdf | video] Honorable mention

Slingsby, A., Dykes, J. and Wood, J. 2010. Rectangular Hierarchical Cartograms for Socio-Economic Data, Journal of Maps, v2010, 330-345. DOI: 10.4113/jom.2010.1090 [link].

Wood, J., Dykes, J., Slingsby, A. 2010. Visualization of Origins, Destinations and Flows with OD Maps, The Cartographic Journal 47 (2) pp117-129. DOI:10.1179/000870410X12658023467367 [link]

Slingsby, A., Wood, J. and Dykes, J. (2010) Treemap Cartography for showing Spatial and Temporal Traffic Patterns, Journal of Maps, v2010, 135-146. DOI: 10.4113/jom.2010.1071 [download | demo].