VAW 2011

The Third International UKVAC Workshop on Visual Analytics (VAW 2011)

University College London, London, UK

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/securityinstitute/vaw2011

Proposals are invited for VAW2011, the third international UKVAC workshop on Visual Analytics. VAW addresses the exciting emerging field of Visual Analytics - the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visualisation. The workshop aims to bring together UK and overseas academics, government and industry experts with an interest in the role of visual analytics for supporting people in solving information intensive problems. VAW 2011 is supported by the US Department of Homeland Security and HM Government in the UK.

The UKVAC is a partnership of UK universities with a shared interest in establishing a multi-disciplinary scientific community in the UK with active overseas links dedicated to promoting and contributing to the Visual Analytics research and development agenda. It comprises five UK universities: Bangor University, Imperial College London, Swansea University, University College London, and led by Middlesex University.

The workshop covers both the theoretical foundations and application of Visual analytics in wide ranging domains such as security and defence, law enforcement, emergency management, medicine and business.

Objectives and Formats

September 6th – Young Visual Analytics Researchers’ Symposium

• Keynote/tutorial
• Young researchers presentations/discussions
• Closing discussion

Following the success of the Visual Analytics Summer School (VASS) 2010, the workshop will begin with a one-day young researchers’ symposium. This will provide an opportunity for early stage PhD students, Masters and final year undergraduate students and early-career industry researchers who are undertaking research projects in related areas, to present and discuss their work with peers and leaders in the field. The aim will be to foster a positive and relaxed environment. Participation in the young researchers’ symposium is by invitation following the acceptance of a 500 word abstract describing the work to be presented. Please refer to the workshop website for submission details.

September 7th and 8th – Main Workshop

The main workshop will feature keynote presentations for key speakers in the field. This year we have Dr. Joseph Kielman, who is the Science and Technology Directorate at Department of Homeland Security, US. A series of sessions will also be included for paper presentations which describe latest developments in Visual Analytics research and application. The first main workshop day (7th) will conclude with a workshop dinner. Proposals are invited for papers from academia, industry and stakeholders which describe empirical findings, new developments and first hand experiences related to Visual Analytics. Papers will be selected by peer review. Submission should be prepared in ACM/CHI double-column format with a maximum length of 4 pages. Please refer to the workshop website for submission details.

Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

• Visual representations and interaction techniques including new visual paradigms, interaction design, network visualisation, and geospatial and temporal visualizations.
• Data management and knowledge representation including scalable data representations for stream and semantic data, and synthesis of information from diverse data sources.
• Algorithms and mathematics that are fundamental for visual analytics and enable interactive visual analysis.
• Analytical reasoning and sensemaking including the human analytic discourse, knowledge discovery methods, perception and cognition.
• Collaboration in visual analytics.
• Evaluation of visual analytics methods.
• Visual representations of analytics provenance that capture the visual analytics and reasoning process, address data lineage and quality issues such as reproducibility and missing data, and enable their presentation and dissemination.
• Applications of visual analytic techniques, including but not limited to applications in security, defence, science, engineering, humanities, business, public safety, commerce, and logistics.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline (main workshop and young researcher symposium): 4 June 2011
• Notification (main workshop and young researcher symposium ): 11 July 2011
• Workshop: 6-8 September 2011

Following the workshop, selected authors will be invited to extend their papers for submission to a VAW special issue of the Information Visualisation Journal (to be confirmed).

Registration

Once accepted at least one author is expected to register and present at the workshop.

There will be a small registration fee (£100 for early-bird registration, TBC) and online registration will be available closer to the event.

Organisation

Co-chairs

• Dr Kai Xu, Middlesex University, UK
• Professor Chris Hankin, Imperial College, UK
• Professor Ann Blandford, University College London, UK

Young Researchers’ Symposium Chair

• Dr Simon Attfield, Middlesex University, UK