InfoVis 2004 Projects

Geotime

The first project showed at InfoVis 2004, on Monday 8:30 AM, was one of the most innovative. Geotime by Thomas Kapler is a project financed by NGA and it aims to analyze observations over Time and Geography, which is a particular hard task to visualize. I believe this project is one of the best that I’ve seen in overlapping these two realms. For more information here’s a link to the project’s paper (pdf) Geotime. I will try to contact the author and see if there’s a way of downloading or experimenting the project online.



MNIST Digits

This project was shown as a poster. The visualization is not highly innovative, although its 3D properties are quite interesting, however its resilience to complexity is extraordinary. I saw the author zooming in and out of our virtual spatial galaxy in his Dell laptop at a surprising ease. We could observe millions of other galaxies, millions of highly complex nodes, appearing on the screen in an effortless manner. Unfortunately the demo is only available for Windows and Linux, but nevertheless here’s the link to the website.

Monkellipse

Another project co-authored by Bradford Paley, author of TextArc, shown as a poster at the InfoVis 2004. Monkellipse maps all the articles and papers, divided by subject areas, that appeared at the InfoVis Conference since its beginning. One thing that really amazed me in this project was that it was built in flash. Since I’m building my thesis project front-end application in flash, I’ve been a little worried with its resistance to complexity. It was encouraging to see how smoothly a flash application can perform, even when it displays more than 640 nodes. Here’s a link to the project website.

Time-varying data visualization using information flocking boids

Unfortunately, one of my favorite projects shown at InfoVis 2004 is not available online, except for a fee of $19 at the IEEE website. This project is worthy of note since it illustrates innovative visual methods of displaying complex networks. The only free link I could find online was the author’s personal website, however, there are no images of the project. When I have the time I’ll scan a few images from the InfoVis proceedings publication so you can see what I mean.

Steerable, Progressive Multidimensional Scaling

This Project by Tamara Munzner and Matt Williams offers a compelling approach to Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) in the form of a computation engine and visualization tool that progressively computes an MDS layout and handles datasets of over one million points. For more information here’s the project’s website.



Hierarchical Clustering Explorer

Hierarchical Clustering Explorer is a Bioinformatics visualization tool and can be downloaded here. (only for Windows)

Others

Sadly, many projects present at InfoVis 2004 are not yet available online. I will try to update this post when these projects become available.