The VIS 2018 Practitioner Guide
This guide presents a high-level guide to some of the most interesting technical sessions of the IEEE VIS 2018 conference, with a particular emphasis on sessions that are of relevance to practitioners. For a complete list of conference sessions and the full conference program, please refere to ieeevis.org and their at-a-glance-schedule.
When preparing the practitioner guide, we incorporated the titles and abstracts of content appearing at this year’s conference as well as statements elicited from paper authors. In this way, we identified six practitioner interest groups, which also appear now throughout the VIS PDF and print program available at ieeevis.org:
Finally, along with indicating which sessions may be of interest to these pracititoner groups, we also produced high-level summaries of what pracitioners can expect to take away from these sessions:
All Practitioners
AP Tutorial: Everything Except the Chart 2018
Sunday, October 21, 9:00 am - 12:40 pm, Room II
AP Tutorial: Comparative Visualization: Interactive Designs and Algorithms Depending on Data and Tasks
Sunday, October 21, 2:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Estrel B
- Tutorial information (hint: you already found us.)
AP VisInPractice
Monday, October 22, 9:00 pm - 6:00 pm, Estrel A
AP VIS Welcome, VGTC Awards, Test of Time Awards, VIS Best Papers
Tuesday, October 23, 9:00 am - 11:00 am, Convention Hall 1, Section C + D
AP VIS Keynote: When Visualization Met Augmented Reality
Tuesday, October 23, 11:20 am - 12:40 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C + D
AP VAST: Evaluation & Theory
Tuesday, October 23, 2:05 pm - 4:00 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get instructive guidance on which multi-dimensional data visualization technique to use for analyzing fuzzy clusters,
- Learn about exploration experiences of professional data analysts and how this should inform the design of new tools,
- Get to know a theory that can be used to evaluate and compare design options of a visualization application in a VR/VE platform, and to reason about its merits and demerits.
AP InfoVis: Evaluation & Applications
Tuesday, October 23, 4:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section D
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Learn about a new approach for assessing the value of visualizations,
- Consider exploration diversity and pacing as metrics for improving the design of interactive visualizations for the web, so as to promote more open-ended exploratory behaviour,
- Get informed about the state of the art with regards to visualizing cultural heritage collection data, for both communication and exploration,
- See examples of applied visualization projects in two healthcare domains involving clinical data: type 1 diabetes treatment and genealogy.
AP VAST: Applications
Wednesday, October 24, 11:00 am - 12:40 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Know the main commercial visual analytics systems and what their strengths and weaknesses are,
- Get to know a system that allows clinicians to store and interactively inspect complex data derived during clinical gait analysis, to include their own knowledge into the system and to share this knowledge with others,
- Learn about the design process behind a successful, multi-site project in precision medicine.
AP InfoVis: Text & Communication
Wednesday, October 24, 02:20 pm - 04:00 pm , Convention Hall 1, Section D
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Understand how visualization dashboards are used in practice,
- Rethink the document reading experience with a new technique for integrating tables and contextual visualization into text,
- Discover a new tool for interpreting and predicting the behavior of natural language models by way of input and internal state perturbation,
- Find out what happens when convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are applied to the perception of visualization.
AP Posters + Networking + Hiring events
Wednesday, October 24, 5:20 pm - 7:00 pm, Foyers
AP Panel: Meet the Founders: How to Start and Sustain a Business in the Visualization Space
Thursday, October 25, 2:20 pm - 4:00 pm, Room IV
AP VIS Capstone: Can I Believe What I See?—Information-Theoretic Algorithm Validation
Friday, October 26, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C
AP VIS Closing
Friday, October 26, 12:00 pm - 12:30 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Biomedical Applications
BA Tutorial: Topological Data Analysis Made Easy with the Topology ToolKit (TTK)
Sunday, October 21, 2:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Paris Room
BA BioVis Challenge
Monday, October 22, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm, Estrel B
BA SciVis: Biological Applications
Tuesday, October 23, 4:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Estrel Hall A+B
This session will focus on adavances in applied biomedical visualization. Among other things, practitioners will:
- Learn about techniques for RNA and DNA design and analysis,
- Get to know a system which facilitates the intuitive exploration of large molecular trajectories.
BA SciVis: Biomedical Visualization
Wednesday, October 24, 9:00 am - 10:40 am, Estrel Hall A+B
In this session, attendees will:
- Learn about visualization techniques which help assess and treat cerebral aneurisms,
- See how visualization can lead to a better spatial understanding of tissue samples in clinical pathology,
- Get to know new ways to study neuronal structures in the brain using wide-field microscopy images.
BA VAST: Text
Wednesday, October 24, 9:00 am - 10:40 am, Estrel Hall C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Gain knowledge on building visual text analytics tools and the opportunities to narrow the gulf between the visualization and text mining fields,
- Get to know a visualization framework that aids readers in understanding and analyzing the contents of medium-sized text collections.
BA CG&A: Session 2
Thursday, October 25, 11:00 am - 12:40 pm, Room III
Of particular interest to practitioners working in biomedical application areas, those attending this session will, among other things:
- Learn about a technique for assessing patient-specific cerebral aneurysm risk applied in during a clinical routine,
- Improve diagnostic processes with a new multimodal tool for exploring 3D data volumes.
Data Science and Machine Learning
DS VAST Challenge
Sunday, October 21, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm, Estrel Hall C
DS Workshop: DSIA: Data Systems for Interactive Analysis
Sunday, October 21, 2:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Room III
DS VDS: Visualization in Data Science
Monday, October 22, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section D
DS Workshop: Machine Learning from User Interaction for Visualization and Analytics
Monday, October 22, 9:00 am - 12:40 pm, Paris Room
DS Workshop: Visualization for AI Explainability (VISxAI)
Monday, October 22, 2:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Paris Room
DS VAST: Ensemble & Provenance
Wednesday, October 24, 9:00 am - 10:40 am, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Learn about the requirements to augment existing client-side web applications with support for capturing, reviewing, sharing, and reusing steps in the reasoning process.
DS VAST: Text
Wednesday, October 24, 9:00 am - 10:40 am, Estrel Hall C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Gain knowledge on building visual text analytics tools and the opportunities to narrow the gulf between the visualization and text mining fields,
- Get to know a visualization framework that aids readers in understanding and analyzing the contents of medium-sized text collections.
DS VAST: High Dimensional Data
Wednesday, October 24, 02:20 pm - 04:00 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get to know an approach that enables vis and non-vis experts to identify and understand clusters, correlations and complex patterns, all by looking at familiar tables,
- Learn how to compare embedding models from ML and understand what properties are preserved across different embedding techniques.
DS VAST: Interactive Analytics & Design
Thursday, October 25 , 9:00 am - 10:40 am, Estrel Hall C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get to know an approach that can be used to improve the quality of labeled training data,
- Get to know a tool for the interactive exploration of logistic regression models
- Learn about a manipulation interface that allows users to quickly explore and visually analyze the parameters of multidimensional ensemble data sets,
- Understand how to design better writing support tools via pen and touch interaction and intelligent visual diagramming,
- Get to know an interactive tool for guided clustering analysis that helps to quickly reason about differences between clusterings.
DS VAST: Deep Learning
Thursday, October 25, 11:00 am - 12:40 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get an overview over the burgeoning research area of visual analytics for deep learning and open source tools useful for understanding neural networks,
- Get to know an interactive tool for learning and playing with GANs, one of the popular deep learning models.
DS VAST: Explainable & VA-Assisted ML
Thursday, October 25, 04:20 pm - 06:00 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Learn about a model-agnostic technique that helps users visually interpret the behavior of a classifier. It can be applied in domains such as healthcare, finance, or general data analytics tasks where the interpretation of a model is required,
- Get to know an approach that can be used in different domains that require to understand and interpret the decisions made by random forests,
- Get guidance on which VA technique to use for improving their machine learning model.
DS VAST: Event, Sequence, & ML
Friday, October 26, 9:00 am - 10:40 am, Convention Hall 1, Section C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get to know a technique that can be applied in domains where event sequence data are collected (e.g., analysis of electronic health records and clickstream data),
- Learn how data analysis novices can be supported when conducting pairwise comparisons by addressing execution and interpretation barriers.
User Experience, Human Factors, and Interaction Design
UX Tutorial: Introduction to IATK: An Immersive Visual Analytics Toolkit
Sunday, October 21, 9:00 am - 12:40 pm, Estrel Hall B
UX Workshop: Toward a Design Language for Data Physicalization
Sunday, October 21, 9:00 am - 12:40 pm, Room III
UX InfoVis: Devices: Large & Small
Wednesday, October 24, 11:00 am - 12:40 pm , Estrel Hall C
Of particular interest to user experience / human factors researchers and interaction designers, practitioners attending this session will, among other things
- Discover a new interactive computing platform for collaborative ubiquitous analytics,
- Hear about experimental findings that can be applied to the visualization in mobile apps and mobile-first websites for personal health tracking weather reporting, and finance,
- Appreciate constraints and opportunities with respect to visualizing data for multiple coordinated views across large displays, for multi-touch surface displays, and for smartwatch displays.
UX InfoVis: Immersive Analytics
Thursday, October 25, 9:00 am - 10:40 am , Convention Hall 1, Section D
Of particular interest to user experience / human factors researchers and interaction designers, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get acquainted with a new toolkit for rapidly building immersive visualization experiences in VR and AR,
- See a new technique for ‘sculpting’ 3D trajectories, such as in air space management,
- Appreciate the potential for immersive flow maps and their applications in geography, anthropology, and financial analysis
- Consider the ‘smell of data’, or how ‘information olfactation’ can augment information recall and increase presence in immersive visualization environments
- Witness the use of wheeled micro-robots in dynamic data physicalization.
UX InfoVis: Interaction
Thursday, October 25, 11:00 am - 12:40 pm , Estrel Hall C
UX SciVis: Interaction and Multivariate Data
Thursday, October 25 , 04:20 pm - 06:00 pm, Estrel Hall A+B
Practitioners concerned with either multivariate data or interactive visualization will:
- Get to know a new visualization design, which can be used by non-experts to effectively illuminate 3D scenes such as interactive museum installations,
- Learn about a framework that enables them to efficiently analyze high-resoluton, multivariate data generated by large-scale scientific simulations,
- See how a details-first design guideline can support the analysis of computational fluid dynamics data as well as data from a number of other domains.
Data Journalism and News Graphics
DJ Tutorial: Everything Except the Chart 2018
Sunday, October 21, 9:00 am - 12:40 pm, Room II
DJ Tutorial: Storyboards for Science: Combining the Visual and Verbal to Create Engaging Communication
Monday, October 22, 2:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Room III
DJ InfoVis: Design & Storytelling
Thursday, October 25, 11:00 am - 12:40 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section D
Of particular interest to data journalists and news graphics designers, practitioners attending this session will, among other things:
- Get informed about best practices for making communication-oriented visualization more accessible and shareable,
- See how to incorporate slideshow tutorials as a way to introduce novel visualization designs to non-expert audiences,
- Learn about a practical workshop approach to jumpstarting visualization design and development projects.
Simulation Science
SS LDAV: Large Data Analysis and Visualization
Sunday, October 21, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm, Convention Hall 1, Section D
SS Tutorial: Recent Feature Tracking Techniques
Sunday, October 21, 2:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Room II
SS Tutorial: Topological Data Analysis Made Easy with the Topology ToolKit (TTK)
Sunday, October 21, 2:20 pm - 6:00 pm, Paris Room
SS BioVis Challenge
Monday, October 22, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm, Estrel B
SS SciVis: Space and Physics
Wednesday, October 24, 02:20 pm - 04:00 pm, Estrel Hall A+B
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get an overview of a diverse set of scientific visualization applications, as diverse as the analysis of porous media, vast astronomical data bases, and weather forecasts and
- Get to know visualization approaches that help improve weather forecasts.
SS SciVis: SciVis Contest
Wednesday, October 24, 02:20 pm - 04:00 pm, Estrel Hall C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get an in-depth review of how a number of different teams approached a specific visualization challenge: the analysis of a simulated deep-water asteroid impact.
SS Scalable Techniques
Thursday, October 25, 11:00 pm - 12:40 pm, Estrel Hall A+B
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Get to know approaches for the visualization of non-cartesian mesh data,
- Learn about ray casting approaches for unstructured and AMR grids.
SS CG&A: Session 2
Thursday, October 25, 11:00 am - 12:40 pm, Room IV
Of particular interest to practitioners working in biomedical application areas, those attending this session will, among other things:
- Learn about a technique for assessing patient-specific cerebral aneurysm risk applied in during a clinical routine,
- Improve diagnostic processes with a new multimodal tool for exploring 3D data volumes.
- See a diverse set of visualization solutions for specific analysis prolems,
- Learn how visualization helps teaching college courses, explore and explain outer space, and improve clinical diagonstics.
SS SciVis: Time-Varying Data
Friday, October 26, 09:00 pm - 10:40 pm, Estrel C
Among other things, practitioners attending this session will:
- Learn how to analyse time-dependent flow fields, e.g., by finding relationships between physical attributes or by focusing on time-invariant properties,
- Get to know a new plotting mechanism which is designed to plot data with three dimensions, e.g., space, attribute and time with applications in various domains.