[Colloq] Guest Speaker: Cody Dunne, IBM Watson Health - 3/24 10am WVH366

[Timothy Bickmore]

Thu 3/24 10-11am WVH366

*Title: *Interactive visualizations for reasoning, communication, and 
collaboration

*Abstract:*
The modern world is awash in complex data that can contain the keys to 
improving our lives. The scope of this data has rapidly outpaced our 
capabilities to analyze and comprehend, so we turn to computers to help. 
However, state-of-the-art technology can only supplement the human 
element. People assist in each stage of data science, whether it's data 
cleaning, understanding algorithm design, exploring computed results, or 
collaborating and sharing for decision-making. To present complex 
information to humans, we use visualizations that leverage our 
extraordinary perceptual system which can detect trends, clusters, gaps, 
and outliers almost instantly.

A challenging and increasingly important type of data is networks of 
entities and their relationships. Networks have been are widely used 
across diverse disciplines to reason about complex behavior. These 
analyses involve understanding relationships, as well as associated 
attributes, statistics, or groupings. The omnipresent node-link 
visualization excels at showing topology and features simultaneously, 
but many are difficult to extract meaning from due to poor layout or 
shoehorning inherent complexity into limited space. The first part of my 
talk will detail techniques for measuring the readability of node-link 
visualizations and strategies to help users create more effective and 
understandable visualizations.

Moreover, analyses of complex data often requires several sessions, and 
when returning later it can be difficult to recall the steps in your 
workflow. Data science in many domains is also highly collaborative. 
Multiple analysts may be working alongside stakeholders with varying 
expertise and time constraints. The second part of my talk addresses 
these needs, and I introduce visualization strategies that assist in 
making analysis workflows repeatable, free of errors, understandable, 
and easily shareable.

*Bio:*
Dr. Cody Dunne is a Research Scientist in the Cognitive Visualization 
Lab at IBM Watson Health. He works at the intersection of information 
visualization, visual analytics, human-computer interaction, and 
computer science. Cody's work focuses on making network easier to 
analyze and share and the application of network analysis techniques to 
real-world problems. Some domains Cody has worked on include visualizing 
concepts from medical records, the spread of infectious diseases, 
citations in academic literature, interactions of people and 
organizations, relationships in archaeological dig sites, news term 
co-occurrence, thesaurus category relationships, municipal energy use, 
and computer network traffic flow. Cody contributes to the NodeXL 
project, an open source network visualization template for Microsoft 
Excel. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in computer science under 
Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction 
Lab in 2013 and 2009, respectively. He earned a B.A. degree in computer 
science and mathematics from Cornell College in 2007.