Date

29th November 2004

Opening Presentor

Peter Philips

Discussion Topic

The process of capturing user behavior is probably one of the more tricky aspects of doing HCI research. Ignoring the fact that data analysis can take an inordinate amount of time; making sure your study / experiment is actually setup to capture something you can interrogate later on (e.g. cameras placed in meaningful positions) and facilitates the easy synchronisation of the various items being recorded (e.g. video footage synch to keystrokes entered), is often the hardest task.

Humans: - the goal this week is to identify (through discussion) whether we have the current means to facilate the easy setup and synchronisation of data logging experiments; with an emphasis on video footage, and if not can we devise a software / opertaing procedure to make this so?

We encourage anybody who has or in the future is intending to run study's / experiments of this kind to come along and help formulate a data logging strategy for future students.

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Date

15th November 2004

Presenting

Encrico Bertini

Abstract

The main motivation behind Infovis is to make abstract information visible, so that, exploiting the extraordinary power of the human visual channel, people can easily perform analysis and exploration tasks. In this way, users can interactively explore complex data with ease, answering questions, verifying hypothesis, discovering structures, trends, and unexpected relations.

But if visualizations suffer themselves from clarity, if they cannot support people in the very task they are made for, if users have to struggle with the intricacies of visual representations, instead of feeling to operate a powerful inspection tool, their main function is lost. The problem of clutter in Information Visualization is a very pervasive and relevant one, cutting across many different visualization techniques, and almost entirely neglected until recently.

We are coping with this by providing some quality measures to say "how cluttered" an image is and using sampling techniques to automatically and semi-automatically reduce the image degradation.

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Presentation Slides

Date

8th November 2004

Presenting

Fariza Hanis Abdul Razak

Abstract

None

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Presentation Slides

Date

1st November 2004

Presenting

Geoff Ellis

Abstract

This paper presents a technique, the Quantum Web Field, designed to give an ambient visualisation of the current activity on a web site. It uses the paths of past visitors to the site and a self-organising map to build a diffuse 'probabilistic' mapping of pages to cells in a 2D matrix, where highly traversed page-links tend to be closer to each other.

The paths of current visitors appear as intelligible trails giving a sense of purposeful human activity rather than offering detailed analysis. The visualisation is not constrained by either the complexity or the number of pages in the site.

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Presentation Slides