2012

January 2012: I 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.

2011

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.

August 2011: I'm recording weather conditions using a weather station on the roof of our department. Live data are sent to Weather Underground and are displayed on my homepage.

July 2011: Our paper "Exploring Uncertainty in Geodemographics with Interactive Graphics" [see video] with Jason and Jo, has been accepted at InfoVis. The paper presents a design that uses interactive visualisation to let users to delve into a geodemographic classifier (OAC) to study uncertainty and the original data that drives the classifier, spatially and by category. We used an implementation of this design to assess 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).

July 2011: I co-authored a paper entitled "BallotMaps: Detecting Name Bias in Alphabetically Ordered Ballot Papers" with Jo, Jason and Donia, which finds evidence of voting bias related to the alphabetical ordering of names on ballot papers in local London elections. The paper was accepted at VisWeek, with be presented in October and will appear in IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics 17(6).

July 2011: I participated in a workshop that was part of the International Cartographic Association conference in Paris on Persistent Problems in GeoVisualization. An inspiring workshop where speakers presented their views on persistent problems in geographical visualisation and then discussed with the audience.

June 2011: I participated in a workshop at the Lorentz Center (Lieden, Netherlands) about the Analysis and Visualization of Moving Objects. Participants were from GIS, computational geometry, statistics and ecology. Issues of scale, scalability, sampling, context, clustering that affect the analysis and visualisation of such data were discussed, with a focus on animal tracking.

June 2011: I 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.

May 2011: I spent two weeks with Emiel, Judy, Adriaan and Willem at the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. They are using GPS tracks of birds to better understand birds' 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.

April 2011: I attended the European Geophysical Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, contributing two posters: "Browsing large natural hazard event sets" [abstract] and "Sharing insights on the impact of natural disasters on Twitter" [abstract | poster].

March 2011: I attended the GeoViz 2011 workshop and presented work on designing interactive graphics for validating and interpreting storm track model outputs. We also presented work on visualising the distribution of bicycle hires and demonstrated HiDE through our vizTweet poster.

March 2011: We have released a new version of the Hierarchical Data Explorer (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.

March 2011: We're asking users to analyse data on socioeconomic impacts of natural disasters using HiDE (through the Earthquake-report website), sharing their finding through Twitter and then filling in a questionnaire about their experiences afterwards.Details are here. We plan to report our findings from this at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in April.

February 2011: Two maps that I designed with colleagues were shortlisted for the Journal and Maps' Best Map Award 2010 - Treemap Cartography for showing Spatial and Temporal Traffic Patterns and Rectangular Hierarchical Cartograms for Socio-Economic Data.

February 2011: I've designed an interactive web-based mapping tool with Leicestershire County Council that allows citizens 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.

February 2011: I was 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. I'll 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.

January 2011: I participated in the MOVE meeting in Mons, Belgium. MOVE is an EU funded research network of expertise in representing, analysing and visualising data about moving objects.

2010

December 2010: We've released HiDE, software that lets you build information graphics from data and tweet them. Data can be explored changing the mapping of data variables to the visual variables of size, order and colour. Try out the example datasets we provide!

December 2010: I participated in the Eurostat Hackday in London which ran simultaneously with other in different European cities. We concentrated on EU energy data and used HiDE to explore data on energy consumption and renewable energy production in different EU countries over time which was written up on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog and the Guardian datablog. These data are now included in the HiDE download.

December 2010: Some of our OAC map work has featured on "Best of the Web" feature in the Telegraph, following its appearance in the same newspaper last August.

December 2010: I was awarded a Staff Research Prize for my work with the National Centre of Atmospheric Science that resulted in a high profile award, publicity for the university and the opportunities for further collaboration.

December 2010: Our placeSurvey exploratory interface was recently featured on the Information Aesthetics blog. It allows exploration of the satisfaction of the citizens of Leicestershire with their area and council, from a major survey that was carried out in 2008.

December 2010: I presented our work on map legend design to the Geography Department at the University of Zurich at a lunchtime seminar.

December 2010: I participated in a week-long workshop on handling and analysing moving object data at Schloss Dagstuhl. The workshop brought together geographers, computational geometrists and applied domain experts for an inspiring workshop that has provided new collaboration opportunities.

November 2010: Jo and I attended the AGI annual dinner to pick up our Best Paper at GISRUK award. The paper was coauthored with Jason Dykes and Robert Radburn.

October 2010: I've just come back from VisWeek in Salt Lake City, where I've co-authored a number of contributions and presented our "Making Hurricane Tracks Accessible" [link] Discovery Exhibition entry (with NCAS and WRN) and our "Tweeting Visualisations for Collaborative Analysis" [abstract | poster]. My colleagues and I picked up three awards.

October 2010: We have been given an honorable mention for our paper Rethinking Map Legends with Visualization at the InfoVis conference at VisWeek in Salt Lake City. 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.

October 2010: Some of our recent work is now featured on the giCentre Vimeo channel.

October 2010: We have won the Discovery Exhibition Award for our "Making Hurricane Tracks Accessible" - joint work with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading through the Willis Research Network. The Discovery Exhibition showcases visualisation that has made a tangible impact on users. We describe the impact that interactive visualization is having on climate scientists and the insurance industry, by helping climate scientists validate their model of simulated storm tracks, generate research questions and disseminate this knowledge.

September 2010: Jason and I spent four days in Helsinki with researchers at Aalto University, developing means for visual analysis of their data on factors that affect how the 'happiness' of citizens. We identified questions they had of their data, implemented some novel techniques to help them answer these questions and will be evaluating how effective these are over the next couple of months.

August 2010: We won a prize for "good overall design and analysis" for our 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.

August 2010: Our paper "Rectangular Hierarchical Cartograms for Socio-Economic Data" has just been published in the Journal of Maps [link]. Here, we describe and demonstrate how we've added geography into treemaps resulting in hierarchical cartograms that can depict both spatial and non-spatial hierarchies, using a geodemographic map of Britain at unit postcode.

August 2010: I've been involved with a number of contributions that have just been accepted at VisWeek 2010 in October: including one paper, one poster, two Discovery Exhibition entries and a prize for our VAST Challenge entry.

August 2010: I've produced some graphs of London's new bike hire scheme over the past 24 hours. Docking stations can by sorted by distance from any of the 300 or so docking stations in London. Interesting daily patterns can be seen - for example, commuting patterns between work and home/railway stations and where and when it is difficult to find a bike to hire.

July 2010: I attended the Ninth International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment at Leicester University and presented visual analysis techniques for comparing catastrophe (CAT) model outputs [pdf]. This was joint work with Willis as part of the Willis Research Network.

June 2010: The latest issue of the Cartographic Journal editorial describes our work as "an antidote to much of what we are seeing currently", and continues with "unless we see more like theirs, it is questionable whether an exhibition or television series in years to come will have much to say about the quality of the cartography of the start of the 21st century".

June 2010: Our paper "Visualisation of Origins, Destinations and Flows with OD Maps" has just been published in the Cartographic Journal which describes our new technique for visualising origin and destination data.

June 2010: Our transport mapping paper and map "Treemap Cartography for showing Spatial and Temporal Traffic Patterns" has just been published in the Journal of Maps. An interactive demo is also available.

May 2010: I presented our vizTweets project for collaborative visual data analysis for insurance natural hazard risk management at the European Geophysical Union General Assembly 2010 in Vienna.

April 2010: Best Paper and UKMap challenge award. I attended GISRUK and presented "OAC Explorer: Interactive exploration and comparison of multivariate socioeconomic population characteristics" [pdf] which won Best Paper and presented our winning entry "Aerial Photographs with Responsive Legends" [details] to the UKMap challenge.

March 2010: I've had my paper "Risk Management Collaboration and Discussion through Shared Interactive Graphics" [abstract] accepted for oral presentation at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in May.

March 2010: I've had my paper "Visual analysis of sensitivity in CAT models: Interactive visualisation for CAT model sensitivity analysis" [pdf] accepted for oral presentation at Accuracy 2010 in July.

February 2010: I attended the kick-off meeting for vizTweets, our VRERI JISC-funded project. I also attended the subsequent developer workshop, a stimulating collections of talks, challenges and discussion.

February 2010: Three GISRUK papers that I co-authored have been accepted: "OAC Explorer: Interactive exploration and comparison of multivariate socioeconomic population characteristics" [pdf], "Layout and Colour Transformations for Visualising OAC Data" [pdf] and "vizLegends: Re-Imagining Map Legends with Visualization" [pdf].

February 2010: I attended the Willis Research Network (WRN) quarterly meeting in London - a week of meetings with other WRN members, catastrophe (CAT) modelling companies, insurers, reinsurers and spatial data providers.

February 2010: I've just become a typesetter for the Journal of Maps.

January 2010: Jo, Jason and I won a university staff prize for our collaborative research outputs over the past year.

2009

December 2009: Jo, Jason and I won JISC funding for a 9 month project entitled 'vizTweets' in which we will be using HiVE for sharing interactive graphics using microblogging techniques for colloborative visual analysis.

November 2009: Jo and I attended the annual AGI awards dinner to receive our prize with Jason and Rob for the Best of GISRUK09 paper for our work on OD maps.

November 2009: I attended the Willis Research Network's annual reinsurance conference in Burmuda, presented examples of my research and met with some of the world's largest reinsurance companies.

October 2009: I attended VisWeek09, participated in a the VAST workshop, co-ran our tutorial and presented our paper Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions

September 2009: I visited Rob Radburn and Leicestershire County Council with Jo and Jason to discuss the Timely Information project.

August 2009: We (giCentre) won a prize for our entry to the VAST challenge.

August 2009: Our paper "Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions" has been given an "Honorable Mention" by the reviewing committee of the prestigious IEEE InfoVis conference, placing it in the top five papers present at this years conference.

August 2009: Jason, Jo and I delivered four digital prototypes to EDINA as part of the VizLegends project. These prototypes demonstrate and explore ideas for dynamic legends and data-dense legends for maps.

July 2009: Jo, Jason and I have had our paper "Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions" accepted to the prestigious IEEE InfoVis conference to be held in October in Atlantic City. The paper describes HiVE, a notation (see video) for exploring data through hierarchical layouts and will appear in Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Nov/Dec 2009).

July 2009: Jo, Jason and I have had our tutorial proposal "Exploring Design Decisions for Effective Information Visualization" accepted for IEEE VisWeek 2009. The tutorial - to be run in Atlantic City in October - explores the use of colour, layout, symbolism and animation for good data visualisation design.

July 2009: I presented at the Willis Global Clients' Day and discussed the role of data visualisation with some of the world's largest insurance and reinsurance companies.

July 2009: I gave two talks at our Data Visualisation Day about visualising spatiotemporal data, using seasonal climate forecasts and London house prices as case studies.

May 2009: Jason, Jo and I visited EDINA in Edinburgh to begin a small project on designing digital map legends in the context of spatial data provision.

April 2009: I attended the European Geophysical Union General Assembly (EGU conference) in Vienna and presented preliminary work with Willis on visualising spatio-temporal aspects of traffic, showing how this might relate to hailstorms. Using approaches such as these might help improve insurance loss models in which exposure varies temporally as well as spatially [pdf].

April 2009: Jo, Jason, Rob and I won Best Paper at the GISRUK conference for our paper 'OD Maps for Exploring Spatial Trajectories' [pdf]

April 2009: I attended the annual GISRUK conference and presented some collaborative work we did with Exeter University [pdf] and our entry for the mashup competition. [More details...]

March 2009: Jason, Jo and myself have won a prize in Google's "KML in Research" competition, in which we use KML to show seasonal climate forecasts for South America over a ten year period. This work is the result of collaboration between climate scientists at Exeter University, facilitated by the Willis Research Network. [More details...]

March 2009: I attended the GeoViz workshop in Hamburg with Jason and Rob and presented joint work on the role of order and layout in treemaps for exploring spatiotemporal data. [More details...]

March 2009: I attended the VisMaster Working group on spatiotemporal data aspects of visual analytics with Jason to help define a visual analytics research agenda for Europe.

February 2009: I attended the Willis Research Network Quarterly meeting in London and discussed the role of spatial analysis and visualisation with representatives of reinsurance companies.

2008

December 2008: Jonathan and I completed the final report for our role in the 3D Topo project, a two-year international project coordinated by Delft University of Technology.

December 2008: Attended the WRN Christmas seminar "Supercomputers, Climate Change and Catastrophe Modelling

December 2008: Jason, Jo and myself developed some interactive tools to explore data on books published over the past few centuries with colleagues from The Times newspaper. [More details...]

November 2008: I attended the Willis Research Network Quarterly meeting in Burmuda and discussed the role of spatial analysis and visualisation with representative of reinsurance companies.

November 2008: I attended the 3rd International Workshop on 3D Geo-Information in Soeul, South Korea, and presented some joint work with Jonathan.

October 2008: I attended the VisWeek conference in Columbus, Ohio, at which interesting and cutting edge research and ideas in infomation visualisation were presented across a range of application domains.

September 2008: I attended the Annual Royal Geographical Society conference, and presented work with Jason and Jo on"Mashup cartography for data exploration" paper in the "Maps as Methods" session on the role of cartography in a world of increasing map-based mashups.