SpeakerAaron Quigley
DateOct 07, 2011
Time11:00AM 12:30PM
LocationIF-4.31/33
TitleChallenges in Social Network Visualisation.
Abstract

Information Visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present abstract data in an explicit form. Such static (pictures) or dynamic presentations help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artefact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visualpresentation of data without a physical or geometric form. As such, it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computerinteraction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics and visual design.

In this talk Aaron will present a brief history of social-network analysis and visualisation, introduce analysis and layout algorithms he and his students have developed for visualising such data. Our recent analysis focuses on actor identification through network tuning. In addition to our Social Network Assembly Pipeline, SNAP whichoperates on the premise of “social network inference” where we have studied it experimentally with the analysis of 10,000,000 record sets without explicit relations. Our visualisation has focussedon large scale node-link diagrams, small multiples, dynamicnetwork displays and egocentric layouts. The talk concludes witha number of challenges and open research questions we faceas researchers in using visualisation in an attempt to present dynamic data sources.

BioProfessor Aaron Quigley is the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews. He appointment is part of SICSA and he currently supervises five PhD students. He is the director of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group. His research interests include information visualisation, surface and multi-displaycomputing, human computer interaction and pervasive and ubiquitous computing. He has published over 110 internationally peer-reviewed publications including edited volumes, journal papers, book chapters,conference and workshop papers and holds 3 patents. Aaron is a chartered fellow ofthe British Computer Society (BCS), a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM and is a recipient of the Engineers Australia Excellence in Engineering Education Award.

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