Presentation:
Solving Problems with Visual Analytics: 
The Role of Visualization and Analytics in Exploring Big Data

Never before in history data is generated and collected at such high volumes as it is today. As the volumes of data available to scientists increase, their effective use becomes more challenging. Keeping up to date with the flood of data, using standard tools for data analysis and exploration, is fraught with difficulty. Visual analytics seeks to provide people with better and more effective ways to understand and analyze large datasets, while also enabling them to act upon their findings immediately. Visual analytics integrates the analytic capabilities of the computer and the abilities of the human analyst, allowing novel discoveries and empowering individuals to take control of the analytical process. 

In the visual analysis process, it is not obvious what can be done by automated analysis and what should be done by interactive visual methods. In dealing with massive data, the use of automated methods is mandatory, but there is also a wide range of problems where the use of interactive visual methods is necessary. The talk discusses the different roles of visualization and analysis techniques and exemplifies them with several application examples, illustrating the exiting potential of current visual analysis techniques but also their limitations.

Bio

Daniel Keim is professor and head of the Information Visualization and Data Analysis Research Group at the Computer Science Department of the University of Konstanz, Germany. He has been actively involved in data analysis and information visualization research for more than 30 years and developed a number of novel visual analysis techniques for very large data sets. He has been program co-chair of the IEEE InfoVis and IEEE VAST as well as the ACM SIGKDD conference, and he is chair of the IEEE VAST steering committee. He has been coordinator of the German Science Foundation funded Strategic Research Initiative “Scalable Visual Analytics” and scientific coordinator of the European Commission funded Coordination Action “Visual Analytics – Mastering the Information Age (VisMaster)”. Dr. Keim got his Ph.D. and habilitation degrees in computer science from the University of Munich. Before joining the University of Konstanz, Dr. Keim was associate professor at the University of Halle, Germany and Senior Technology Consultant at AT&T Shannon Research Labs, NJ, USA.

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