Interdisciplinary Seminar Series


Title: Visual Analytics of Heterogeneous Data in Life Science Applications

Speaker: Hans-Jörg Schulz, University of Rostock, Germany and Graz University, Austria

Date: Monday, October 31, 2011 11:00am - 12:00pm

Location: DIMACS Center, CoRE Bldg, Room 431, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ


Abstract:

Data from real-world applications is often heterogeneous, exhibiting sparse and non-uniform distributions across a huge, multi-dimensional data space. Different subsets of heterogeneous data need to be treated differently ? queried differently, analyzed differently, shown differently. This is an inherent problem for Visual Analytics already identified in Thomas' & Cook's Visual Analytics research agenda in 2005.

Especially in the field of Life Sciences, where data are rarely uniform with respect to their provenance, their type, or their distribution, application experts are eager to finally get suitable tools to handle these. This talk presents two of such tools, which have been developed in close collaboration with medical experts: VisBricks, which is a Visual Analytics approach that allows for an intuitive, straightforward exploration of inhomogeneous tabular data, and Stack'n'Flip, which is a visualization design for realizing Visual Analytics workflows across multiple heterogeneous data sets. Based on these two concrete examples, we establish a number of research hypotheses regarding fundamental interrelations between inhomogeneity and heterogeneity of data and its extension to other domains that influence visual analysis.

About the speaker:

Hans-Jörg Schulz received his diploma (2004) and his PhD (2010) from the University of Rostock, Germany. At present, he is a post-doctoral researcher in a project on "Visual Support for the Analysis of hierarchically structured, multiple heterogeneous Data Sources" at the University of Rostock. Furthermore, he is associated with the graduate school "dIEM oSiRiS" in Rostock and an associated researcher at Graz University of Technology, Austria. His main interests concern the visualization of graphs and the adoption of graph visualization and analysis principles for non-graph structured data.


DIMACS/CCICADA Interdisciplinary Series, Complete Fall Calendar 2011