Academics and students present their research at the international conference in data visualisation

The international data visualisation conference (VIS) took place between Sunday 24^th and Friday 29^th October 2021. Academics and students, in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, ran a workshop, presented a research paper, engaged and interacted with conference attendees.

Organised by the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers, IEEE VIS, is the premier forum for advances in visualisation and visual analytics and showcases innovative ideas in data visualisation and human computer interaction. This year, the conference took place online. Professor Jonathan Roberts (Professor in Visualisation) said “Because it was free to attend for full-time students, it enabled many more undergraduate and postgraduate students to attend. We setup a chat session, for our group, where we could hang-out together and discuss the presentations.” Academics in the school were directly involved in running the Visualisation Activities workshop (that took place on Sunday) and gave a paper presentation that took place on Wednesday.

The Visualisation Activities workshop focused on discussing and developing different techniques to Facilitate learn, reflect, discuss, and design data-visualisation activities. Professor Roberts said, “It was great to help run this workshop. In the morning we had paper presentations and a keynote, and in the afternoon, we got the attendees to design their own visualisation activity. It was fun to see how the participants worked together in the remote setting. We used Zoom to allow them to talk with each other and the Miro board so that they could share ideas.

The paper on “Explanatory Journeys: Visualising to Understand and Explain Administrative Justice Paths of Redress” presented work from a collaboration between Bangor Law (Dr Sarah Nason and Ann Sherlock) and the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (Professor Roberts, Dr Butcher). Dr Butcher said, “We presented our tool, Artemus, allowing users to explore and visualise administrative justice paths of redress. The work was well received, and we were delighted to have several conversations in the virtual hallway of the conference about the work.” The ‘Explanatory Journeys’ journal paper was also awarded with an ‘honourable mention’ at the conference.

Dr Panagiotis Ritsos (Lecturer in Visualisation) said “I really enjoyed the 2021 conference. The keynote by danah doyd (Partner research at Microsoft Research) was thought provoking, the discussions in the panel sessions especially interesting, whereas the many world-class papers presented represent the highest calibre of visualisation research. Especially interesting was the conference’s capstone by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, on how unconventional approaches are sometimes particularly successful in data visualisation. While it would have been great to meet in person, the online format worked very well, with chats on Discord, questions asked in Slido and presentations live streamed on YouTube”.

Mr Aron Owen (PhD student in Visualisation) said “This is my first computing conference. I had been to many games' conferences before, so I knew something of what to expect. This conference was great. It was an honour be part of the 3719 attendees. I learned so much about data-visualisation and have made note of many papers that I now need to read in more detail. It has been an excellent start for my PhD journey.”

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg giving their IEEE VIS capstone lecture, showing their pride and prejudice visualisation

Publication date: 5 November 2021