Attached is the May 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.

The increasing adoption of video surveillance makes it possible to watch over sensitive areas and identify people responsible for damage, theft and violence. However, when such events are not detected immediately, the subsequent video analysis can be a long and tedious task. In this article is presented a technique that allows a human investigator to focus only on those parts of a video showing the event as it unfolds, and so helping to save on the time needed to identify and understand how it happened. The presented technique creates a single interactive image of the whole video that shows everything that happened in the scene.

The research focusses on methods and techniques to integrate data from different sources and dimensions (2D, 3D, Time). The data are offered via a variety of map representations in multi-functional visual (online) environments that allow exploration and data analysis. To justify the solutions produced, usability research is an integral part of the activities.

Geographic data is characterized by a locational, attribute and temporal component. The time component can be a typical indicator of change of all sorts. For instance, movement data holds information about where the movement took place (the path), what was moving (the object), and especially when it was moving (the time frame). Examples are travel time between cities, the daily trips of commuters, or the possible average speed along a path etc.

The field of visual analytics has opened new directions for smart data analysis and knowledge discovery. Utilizing rich and novel visualization methods and appropriate interaction mechanisms, visual analytics technologies exploit the perceptual abilities and intuition of humans, capacities that have not been matched by machines yet. CERTH / ITI has an active interest in the field of visual analytics and is investing effort into developing relevant technologies.This article presents some of the the current research conducted in CERTH / ITI in the field of visual analytics.

On May 10, 11 on Guimaraes Portugal a workshop, GeoVA(t), was held in conjunction with the AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Sciences.

This workshop had 35 submissions evaluated by five workshop chairs. On the basis of the evaluation (two reviews per submission) 25 papers were accepted for presentation at the workshop. Among them, 16 were invited to be extended for the second round of reviewing for special issues of Int Journal GIScience and Journal of Location based Services.

Attached is the April 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.

The goal of Visual Analytics is to derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments; communicate the assessment effectively for action.

The power of today’s computers combined with efficient pattern recognition abilities and domain knowledge of human analysts is a challenging and very promising road in dealing with large amounts of complex data. It is a major driving force for solutions for information overload in many areas.The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in visual analytics; provide a forum for presentation and discussion of the both mature and new hot ideas, promote research and developments in visual analytics and supporting disciplines[...]

Today’s digital libraries and data centers store huge amounts of data, collected, for example, by scientific experimentation, earth observation, or simulation. The common approach to support user navigation and retrieval in these libraries operates on meta-information that is manually appended to the datasets.

Especially for large datasets, this approach quickly reaches its limits due to scalability with respect to manual annotation.

EuroVAST 2010 is the first international symposium on visual analytics science and technology held in Europe. The goal of the symposium is to promote and advance the combination and integration of visualization and analytics methods for the purpose of problem solving in a variety of application domains. [...]

The EuroVAST program will feature a number of invited speakers from research and industry as well as a poster program. Full papers related to Visual Analytics can be submitted to the Visual Analytics track of the EuroVis conference.EuroVAST is sponsored by the European Coordination Action “VisMaster: Visual Analytics – Mastering the Information Age” in cooperation with EuroGraphics.

The VisMaster project was selected to be one of a few projects in the “Future and Emerging Technology” EU funding program to be shown in the exhibition “Science beyond Fiction” at the EU parliament in Strasbourg on 20.-21. April 2010.

Goal of the “Science beyond Fiction” exhibition at the EU parliament was to show how Information and Communication Technologies will change our life in the future and to discuss related issues with EU politician. The exhibition gave an exciting glimpse of how European researchers are pushing the boundaries of science & technologies to enable radically new opportunities.