CANCELED: Visual Analytics for Homeland Security and for the Masses

Abstract

Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. Its goal is to let users obtain deep insights that directly support assessment, planning, and decision making. It is a multidisciplinary field that includes analyses, visualizations and humans. Representations, transformations and analyses work with all types of conflicting and dynamic data to support visualization. Visualization and interactions exploit the human eye's broad bandwidth pathway into the mind. Analytic results are produced, presented, and disseminated to communicate information in the appropriate context to a variety of audiences. The largest application of visual analytics to date has been homeland security. However one of the grand challenges in information visualization (and visual analytics) is to provide visualizations for the masses. In this talk I will provide an overview of the above, provide examples of visual analytic problems, and describe Weave which incorporates much of our research in large scale data exploration systems. Weave is an open-source web-based system for non-profits and public agencies providing both homeland security and the public with a high performance collaborative and interactive data visualization and analytics platform.

Brief Bio

Georges Grinstein is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, head of its Bioinformatics Program, co-director of its Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, and of its Center for Biomolecular and Medical Informatics. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1978.

His work is broad and interdisciplinary, ranging from perceptual foundations of visualization to techniques for high-dimensional visualization to large scale visualization platforms, with the emphasis on the modeling, development, visualization, and analysis of complex information systems. He has over 30 years in academia with extensive private consulting, over 100 research grants, products in use nationally and internationally, several patents, numerous publications in journals and conferences, founded several companies, and has been the organizer or chair of national and international conferences and workshops in Computer Graphics, in Visualization, and in Data Mining. He has been on the editorial boards of several journals in Computer Graphics and Data Mining, a member of ANSI and ISO, a NATO Expert, and a technology consultant for various public agencies. For the last six years he has co-chaired the IEEE Information Visualization and Visual Analytics Science and Technology contests and challenges leading to new research areas; has been teaching Radical Design, a course teaching students how to innovate with "radical" new products and software instead of evolutionary ones; is co-director of the new Open Indicators Consortium that is developing an open source web-based interactive measures and indicators visualization system; and is a member of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence in visual analytics and advanced data analysis based at Rutgers University.