“Visualization for Scientific Discovery”

Location: LTS Auditorium, 8080 Greenmead Drive

Speaker:
Niklas Elmqvist
College of Information Studies and UMIACS

Abstract:
Big data is the new frontier of computing, and taming its challenges promises to usher in a new era of data-driven decision-making. However, the most difficult of these challenges are not technical in nature, but have more to do with the human factor: storing, querying and processing massive amounts of data is meaningless if it cannot be interpreted and understood by analysts.

Visualization is one method that facilitates the human analysts, yet is currently mostly used for communicating results once they have been found.

In this talk, in addition to showcasing the power of visual communication, I will also push for the use of visualization in the sense-making and analysis process itself. To illustrate my message, I will discuss several of our past and current projects, including using comics for storytelling about data, visualization integrated with online scientific notebooks, visual steering of asynchronous simulation pipelines, and approaches to visualize text for social media data, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Bio:
Niklas Elmqvist is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at UMD. He is also an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of UMIACS.

Prior to joining UMD, he was a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, a postdoctoral researcher at INRIA in France, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Elmqvist’s research areas are information visualization, human-computer interaction, and visual analytics.

He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, the Purdue ECE Chicago Alumni New Faculty, Google research awards in 2009, the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award, and three best paper awards.

Elmqvist is also a senior member of ACM, IEEE, and IEEE Computer Society.

He received his doctorate in computer science from Chalmers University of Technology in 2006.