Coast to Coast Seminar Series

This talk explores the larger implications of visual analytics-- "the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces"-- for cognitive science and informatics. I will argue that the methods that will advance this new science go beyond those of natural science and engineering, and will require researchers to create a new translational cognitive science of analytic systems. We will begin by building field study methods that characterize human and computational cognitive capabilities as they are used for decision-making in a range of situations. Because findings from field methods do not generalize well, we must...

In this talk, we will review some of the recent applied text mining work at Dalhousie. We will argue the need for a text representation that would be more linguistically informed than the standard vector model. We will present one such proposal, in which a co-occurrence model takes into account the distribution of words throughout the corpus. We will then show how this representation is successfully applied in the task of categorizing dream descriptions by their emotional valuation (joint work with J. De Koninck and A. Razavi, Ottawa). We will round up the talk with our experience with some of the other text mining techniques used in the...

This talk underscores the importance of design methods and practices in approaching challenges in the representation of big data. The talk will first reference debates regarding the role and nature of aesthetics and the importance of these to perception and insight, providing illustrations of different aesthetic approaches, at times to the same data set. It will further the discussion of insight by considering ways to work with users and data sets that draw from different practices within design. Fundamentally, design and designers need to be part of the visual analytics equation.

Modern society demands that people manage, communicate, and interact with digital information at an ever-increasing pace. Even though most people want to be informed, all this information is frequently experienced as stress. It is not the information itself that is the problem, but the manner in which we are bombarded with information in forms that are often hard to interpret. How then can we produce interactive visualizations of digital data in a manner that enhances people's cognitive abilities? Ideally, these visualizations would not only present information visually and aesthetically, but provide people with capabilities for...