VACLab wins best paper award at IEEE VIS 2019
The Visual Analysis and Communication Laboratory (VACLab) team from UNC-Chapel Hill won the Best Short Paper Award at the IEEE VIS 2019 Conference in October.
following Morrow’s presentation of their award-winning paper at
IEEE VIS 2019.
UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) Associate Professor David Gotz leads the VACLab and co-authored the winning paper with Bryce Morrow, a master’s student from the UNC Computer Science department, Arlene E. Chung from the UNC School of Medicine, and Trevor Manz and Nils Gehlenborg from Harvard Medical School.
The paper, “Periphery Plots for Contextualizing Heterogeneous Time-Based Charts,” proposes a new approach for more effective data visualization in time-based charts. The periphery plot framework enables users to see how multiple categories of data change over time, and to see changes at multiple timescales. In one of the two use cases presented in the paper and the video demonstration, users can adjust the month and year to see fluctuations in maximum temperature, precipitation, wind, and weather types (snow, sun, fog, etc.) for the Seattle area. The team is also using Periphery Plots in a project that is developing new tools to help doctors find clinically actionable patterns in data gathered from devices such as fitness trackers and smart watches.
VACLab researchers also presented two journal articles at the conference: “Visual Analysis of High-Dimensional Event Sequence Data via Dynamic Hierarchical Aggregation,” and “Selection Bias Tracking and Detailed Subset Comparison for High-Dimensional Data.” In addition to Gotz, other authors include David Borland, Senior Visualization Researcher from the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC (RENCI), Joshua Shrestha, computer science undergraduate student, Wenyuan Wang, SILS PhD student, and Jonathan Zhang, BIOS PhD student.
In addition to his role with SILS and the VACLab, Gotz is Assistant Director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP). He was recently appointed to the Editorial Board for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) journal.