Seminar Details

Recently (2021), Graph Cities have been proposed as scalable 3D visual representations of partitions of billion graph edge sets into “special” connected subgraphs called fixed points of degree peeling. We present a collection of “intuitive” primitives whose composition is useful for exploring these novel “large” graph city representations. These primitives are implemented as interactive navigation tools that include an eight directional steering wheel, individual building walks, path navigations, city tours, and a collection of visual queries. An interactive city glyph map is used as the central coordinator of all the different city views. Each point on the glyph map is addressable by pairing a peel value and the size interval associated with the glyph summarizing a corresponding bucket. A bucket with a single building has associated a circular glyph with colored spikes encoding its waves. A bucket with multiple buildings is represented by a colored spiral, whose detailed view becomes a local graph vicinity. These graph vicinities can be explored with the same functionality of a full Graph City. To explore the internal structure of a building, a user can zoom-in to obtain a 3D force directed layout of a building’s meta DAG that encodes the building local topological structure. We demonstrate visual exploration of a Friendster social network (1.8 billion edges), a co-occurrence keywords network derived from the Internet Movie Database (115 million edges), and a patent citation network (16.5 million edges). 

1. Joint work with Haoyang Zhang based on the BigVis21best paper award, â€œGraph Cities: Their Buildings, Floors, and Fragments”, J. Abello, D. Nakhimovich, H. Chang, M. Aanjaneya