VMG News

Jonathan Roberts, Pangiotis Ritsos and Francis Williams from the School of Computer Science, recently visited Altlanta in the USA to take part in the 2013 IEEE VIS conference (13-18 October). This is the premier visualization conference and takes place every year, and includes three main conferences: Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), Scientific Visualization (SciVis) and Information Visualization (InfoVis).

There were about 900 attendees at the conference, and it was located at the fantastic (awe-inspiring)Atlanta Marriott Marquis hotel. Dr Roberts said “It was excellent to meet up with old friends, and make new ones. Overall a fantastic event”. This year, the visualization group from Bangor presented two posters in the Information Visualization poster session. Francis also was a volunteer at VIS this year, and Jonathan received a certificate of appreciation for being chair of VAST in 2012. There were many highlights at the conference, from the oral presentations of the papers, panels discussing evaluation and big data issues (for instance) to the keynote (Erez Lieberman Aiden) and the capstone Jarke van Wijk.

In particular, in his capstone Jarke talked about “Information Visualization: Challenges and Opportunities” and made some memorable quotes, for example, he said “there is no excuse for not learning something about perception”, and when discussing evaluation he said “Think a user, act a user, be a user”, and finally that we, as visualization engineers should “Think as a designer. Act as a designer. Be a designer”. Next year’s conference will be held in Paris. It will be the first time that VIS will be located outside of the USA.

References

1. P. D. Ritsos, S. A. Panëels, P. J. Rodgers, and J. C. Roberts, “Towards a Formalized Process for Creating Haptic Data Visualizations,” in Posters presented at the IEEE Conference on Visualization (VIS), October 15-18, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2013.   [bib]  

1. F. C. B. Williams and J. C. Roberts, “Classifying Visual Knowledge Representations: 23 Years On,” in Posters presented at the IEEE Conference on Visualization (IEEE VIS 2013), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2013.   [bib]