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

May 2013: I met with ecologists from The Netherlands at the University of Amsterdam to discuss the use of visual analytics for assessing changes in biodiversity.

May 2013: My papers Visual Analytics for Exploring Changes in Biodiversity (with Emiel van Loon; visual analytics for studying biodiversity from millions of species observations) and Visualisation design for representing bird migration tracks in time and space (led by Andrea Kölzsch, with others; design options for depicting bird migration with static graphics) have been accepted at the EnvirVis workshop at EuroVis.

April 2013: I participated in the Dagstuhl seminar on Drawing Graphs and Maps with Curves. We discussed and worked on multidisciplinary solutions to open problems involving drawing curves that were proposed by participants.

April 2013: I presented Historical Internal Migration in Ireland - joint work with Mary Kelly (Kingston University) and Jason Dykes - at the UK's national GIS conference (GISRUK) which was in Liverpool this year.

March 2013: I presented two contributions to GeoViz Hamburg, a workshop characterised by short focussed presentations, demos and lots of time for discussion. I presented "An Exploratory Interface to Public Data for Citizens" (with Jason Dykes, Jo Wood and Robert Radburn) and "Green Spaces: Interactively Mapping the Results of a Public Consultation" (with Robert Radburn).

March 2013: I attended a MOVE-COST meeting and presented work on visualisating migration data using OD maps. MOVE-COST is an EU-funded "action" which funds networking activities for work related to understanding moving object data and I will contribute to the final workshop which will showcase its achievements.

January 2013: I've had two conference abstracts accepted for GeoViz Hamburg in March: "Exploratory Interface to Public Data for Citizens" and "Green Spaces: Interactively Mapping the Results of a Public Consultation". Thanks to my co-authors Jason Dykes, Jo Wood and Robert Radburn (Leicestershire County Council)

December 2012: I 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. A small challenge was set up as part of the workshop that looked at whether information collected from physical sensors could be used to infer behaviour. My entry helps assess how well modelled behaviour corresponds to observed behaviour.

November 2012: I attended the Lloyds Science of Risk at which the best academic risk research of relevance to the insurance industry was honoured. Winning and shortlisted entries included work from Willis Research Network partners.

October 2012: I attended visweek in Seattle where I presented a position paper on involving users in information visualisation design at the BELIV workshop and presented a poster on visualising historical internal migration patterns in Ireland. Co-authored work on using sketchy graphics in information visualisation and our VAST Challenge entry were presented by colleagues.

October 2012: I was a co-author of our VAST Challenge entry with Alex, Iain, Roger, Sarah and Nabiha (see paper and video) which 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. I have been involved in our entries over the last four and this is the third award that we have won.

September 2012: Jason and I 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.

September 2012: I was invited to give a talk at the Center for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo. I talked about the recent Nokia Data Challenge including our 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.

September 2012: I was invited to participate 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.

July 2012: My poster submission with Mary Kelly (National University of Ireland), Jason and Jo entitled OD Maps for Studying Historical Internal Migration in Ireland has been accepted at Visweek in Seattle in October. The poster will demonstrate the "OD Maps" technique to studying migration patterns. A video of the technique is available.

June 2012: I gave a talk 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.

June 2012: My work with Roger and Jo won third prize at the Nokia Data Challenge, from about 50 entries to the Open Challenge. I presented the work at the Nokia Data Challenge workshop, entitled "Visual Analysis of Social networks in Space and Time" [paper | video]. The work uses visual analytics to study social ties between participants and explores how these are embedded in time and space.

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].