Attached is the September 2010 edition of the Integrated Visualization and Analytics Community (iVAC) Newsletter. The Basic/Futures Research (BFR) Program believes that regular communication is one of the most effective ways to enable our Data and Visual Analytics enterprise to flourish.

The iVAC Newsletter is envisioned as a coordinating function for the various activities coming out of the BFR program, international university partners and other government agencies.

The thought is to present and share knowledge of these initiatives, accomplishments in various areas (technology, publications, new funding, etc.), up-coming conferences and events, and other significant happenings to the entire community.

Applications supporting navigation in large networks are used every days by millions of people. They include road map navigators, high route visualization systems, and network visualization systems using node-link diagrams. These applications currently provide generic interaction methods for navigation: pan-and-zoom and sometimes bird’s eye views. This project explores the idea of exploiting the connection information [...]

Social networks collected by historians or sociologists typically have a large number of attributes associated with their actors, and applying analysis algorithms to these networks will produce additional attributes such as degree, centrality, and clustering coefficients. Understanding the effects of this plethora of graph attributes is one of the main challenges in multivariate social networks. [...]

Journalism in the Age of Data  [stanford.edu] is a must-see documentary of about 54 minutes, ‘starring’ some of the most talented and well-known data visualization practitioners of today. The covered topics are wide, but include contemporary issues like Visualization in Journalism, Telling “Data Stories”, Exploring Data or Technology and Tools. It was produced during the [...]

A new interactive application written by the giCentre uses live data from the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme to reveal patterns in docking station use across London.

BikeGrid uses spatial treemaps to show the last 24 hours use of all London docking stations in a grid.

To use the BikeGrid application, find out where bikes and spaces are available across London and explore spatio-temporal patterns in recent cycle usage, go to [...]

We worked with climate scientists at NCAS-Climate (University of Reading, UK) who produce large datasets of simulated storm tracks from General Circulation Models that span many decade, and need to analyse them. We collaboratively designed and implemented interactive visualisation techniques that have opened up their database, enabling storm tracks to be browsed in their spatial and temporal context, and for specific examples to be captured as Quicktime video clips. The purpose of generating these storm tracks was to better understand the spatial and temporal distribution of storms, particularly for extreme events.

In a recent paper (soon available from IEEE TVCG), we present a systematic approach to the interactive visual analysis of heterogeneous data.  The data consists of interrelated parts that are given on spatial grids over time (e.g., the atmosphere and ocean part from a coupled climate model).  By integrating both data parts in a framework [...]