The Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA) 2023 covers all research, development, and application aspects of data visualization and visual analytics. Since the first VDA conference was held in 1994, the annual event has grown steadily into a major venue for visualization researchers and practitioners from around the world to present their work and share their experiences. We invite you to participate by submitting your original research as a full paper, for an oral or interactive (poster) presentation, and attending VDA in the upcoming year.
Computational modeling frequently generates sets of related simulation runs, known as ensembles. These simulations often output 3D surface mesh data, where the geometry and variable values of the mesh are changing with each time step. Comparing these ensembles depends on comparing not only geometric properties, but also associated field data. In this paper, we propose a new metric for comparing mesh geometry combined with field data variables. Our measure is a generalization of the well-known Metro algorithm used in mesh simplification. The Metro algorithm can compare two meshes but doesn't consider field variables. Our metric evaluates a single variable in combination with the mesh geometry. Combining our metric with multidimensional scaling, we visualize a low dimensional representation of all the time steps from a set of example ensembles to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.
This paper presents an online tool for heritage education that visualizes large-scale digital architectural data of the Roman Forum in Rome, Italy. Leveraging Potree and WebGL, the tool enables the web-based visualization of registered point cloud data as the base framework for the context and the reconstructed geometries with mesh models wrapped with images of standing monuments as the focus. The tool enables users to overview the entire heritage site and examine the fine monument details. The 3D reconstructed mesh and surface models are built to allow users to explore and study the site as it exists today in relation to its reconstructed views. The site is tagged with historical information and imagery for further referencing. The paper concludes with a report on visualization results and an ad-hoc evaluation provided by domain experts.
In this paper, we introduce FastPoints, a state-of-the-art point cloud renderer for the Unity game development platform. Our program supports standard unprocessed point cloud formats with non-programmatic, drag-and-drop support, and creates an out-of-core data structure for large clouds without requiring an explicit preprocessing step; instead, the software renders a decimated point cloud immediately and constructs a shallow octree online, during which time the Unity editor remains fully interactive.
To improve clinical care practice, it is important to understand the variability of clinical pathways executed in different contexts (e.g., pathways in different geographical locations, demographics, and phenotypic groups). A common way of representing clinical pathways is through network-based representations that capture trajectories of treatment steps. However, first-order networks, which are based on the Markovian property and the de facto standard model to represent transitions between steps, often fail to capture real trajectories. This paper introduces a visual analytic tool to explore and compare pathways represented in higher-order networks. Because each higher node in the network is a subtrajectory (i.e., partial or full history of treatment steps), the tool can display true sequences of treatment steps and compute the similarity of the two networks in a space of higher-order nodes. The tool also highlights areas in which the two networks are similar and dissimilar and how a certain subtrajectory is realized differently in different pathways. The paper demonstrates the tool's usefulness by applying it to multiple antidepressant pharmacotherapy pathways for veterans diagnosed with major depressive disorder and by illustrating heterogeneity in prescription patterns across pathways.
Teaching color science to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) students is critical to preparing them for advanced topics such as graphics, visualization, imaging, Augmented/Virtual Reality. Color historically receive little attention in EECS curriculum; students find it difficult to grasp basic concepts. This is because today's pedagogical approaches are non-intuitive and lack rigor for teaching color science. We develop a set of interactive tutorials that teach color science to EECS students. Each tutorial is backed up by a mathematically rigorous narrative, but is presented in a form that invites students to participate in developing each concept on their own through visualization tools. This paper describes the tutorial series we developed and discusses the design decisions we made.
We present a new web-based, client-server data processing and visualization framework that supports a flexible workflow, enabling the user to customize different data processing and visualization tasks with tools implemented in different programming languages. Our framework supports server-side applications developed with different languages, allowing visualization researchers to easily make their new techniques available to the target users. The client-side of our framework is implemented in the web browser environment with customizable interface and visualizations. We describe the design of the architecture of our framework and the process of adding new user-defined tasks, followed by the demonstration of the proposed framework on a number of data processing and visualization tasks.
The paper deals with data visualization for media planning. Media planning database is a collection of heterogeneous content (image/video/graphics, text, data analytics, logical expressions, …) to be aggregated, managed, and displayed together. The main contribution is the multi-layer visualization architecture that allows any type of visualization element to be created in its most appropriate libraries. Such visualization ensures spatio-temporal synchronization of displayed content, as well as the proper evolution with the user interaction. The illustrations are provided on two real (yet anonymized) media plans and show how a complex, 7 steps interaction workflow with the media plan can be dealt with.
Healthcare professionals, just like any other community, can exhibit implicit biases. These biases adversely impact patients’ health outcomes. Promoting awareness of both social determinants of health (SDH) and the impact of implicit/explicit biases assists healthcare professionals to understand their patients well and improve care experiences. In addition, it helps to augment the long-lasting empathy and compassion in healthcare professionals towards patients for care treatments while maintaining better healthcare professional-patient relationships. Thus, this research provides Computer-Supported Expert-Guided Experiential Learning (CSEGEL) tools or mobile applications that facilitate healthcare professionals with a first-person learning experience to augment advanced healthcare skills (e.g., professional communication, cultural humility, awareness of both SDH and impact of biases on health outcomes). The CSEGEL tools in the form of mobile applications incorporate virtual reality-based serious role-playing scenarios along with a novel Life Course module to deliver first-person experiential learning capability to augment the advanced healthcare skills of healthcare professionals and public awareness. Finally, a preliminary data analysis is provided to demonstrate the positive influence of CSEGEL tools and measure the required number of sample sizes for concrete evidence to show effective results.
Noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) simulation represents an important step in modern automotive design. It produces large and complex data which is not easy to analyze. The data resides in two domains, the spatial and the frequency domain. In this paper, we extend the current state of the art in visual exploration of such data by supporting comparison tasks. We support the comparison of velocity values of a subset of surface elements for multiple frequency bands. We combine data aggregation on the 3D model with multiple bar charts in a coordinated multiple views system. This new approach allows for an intuitive comparison of multiple velocity values in the context of both domains. We demonstrate the deployment of this approach for an example from the automotive industry, but it can be used with any simulation data that relates to two domains at the same time.