View-Dependent Streamline Deformation and Exploration.

Occlusion presents a major challenge in visualizing 3D flow and tensor fields using streamlines. Displaying too many streamlines creates a dense visualization filled with occluded structures, but displaying too few streams risks losing important features. We propose a new streamline exploration approach by visually manipulating the cluttered streamlines by pulling visible layers apart and revealing the hidden structures underneath.

Visual analytics for power grid contingency analysis.

Contingency analysis employs different measures to model scenarios, analyze them, and then derive the best response to any threats. A proposed visual-analytics pipeline for power grid management can transform approximately 100 million contingency scenarios to a manageable size and form. Grid operators can examine individual scenarios and devise preventive or mitigation strategies in a timely manner.

Visual matrix clustering of social networks.

The prevailing choices to graphically represent a social network are a node-link graph and an adjacency matrix. Both techniques have unique strengths and weaknesses for different domain applications. This article focuses on how to change adjacency matrices from merely showing pairwise associations among network actors (or graph nodes) to depicting clusters of a social network.

Feature tracking and visualization of the Madden-Julian oscillation in climate simulation.

The Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) is one of the less understood aspects of tropical meteorology. It plays a significant role in tropical intraseasonal variations in rain, temperature, and winds over the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Researchers have developed an integrated analysis and visualization tool for MJO episodes simulated by a high-resolution regional model.

The top 10 challenges in extreme-scale visual analytics.

A team of scientists and researchers discusses the top 10 challenges in extreme-scale visual analytics (VA). The discussion covers applying VA technologies to both scientific and nonscientific data, evaluating the problems and challenges from both technical and social perspectives.

A space-filling visualization technique for multivariate small-world graphs.

We introduce an information visualization technique, known as GreenCurve, for large multivariate sparse graphs that exhibit small-world properties. Our fractal-based design approach uses spatial cues to approximate the node connections and thus eliminates the links between the nodes in the visualization. The paper describes a robust algorithm to order the neighboring nodes of a large sparse graph by solving the Fiedler vector of its graph Laplacian, and then fold the graph nodes into a space-filling fractal curve based on the Fiedler vector.

Graph analytics-lessons learned and challenges ahead.

Lessons learned from developing four graph analytics applications reveal good research practices and grand challenges for future research. The application domains include electric-power-grid analytics, social-network and citation analytics, text and document analytics, and knowledge domain analytics.

A novel visualization technique for electric power grid analytics.

The application of information visualization holds tremendous promise for the electric power industry, but its potential has so far not been sufficiently exploited by the visualization community. Prior work on visualizing electric power systems has been limited to depicting raw or processed information on top of a geographic layout. Little effort has been devoted to visualizing the physics of the power grids, which ultimately determines the condition and stability of the electricity infrastructure.

Adding a visualization feature to web search engines: it's time.

It's widely recognized that all Web search engines today are almost identical in presentation layout and behavior. In fact, the same presentation approach has been applied to depicting search engine results pages (SERPs) since the first Web search engine launched in 1993. In this Visualization Viewpoints article, I propose to add a visualization feature to Web search engines and suggest that the new addition can improve search engines' performance and capabilities, which in turn lead to better Web search technology.

Geometry-based edge clustering for graph visualization.

Graphs have been widely used to model relationships among data. For large graphs, excessive edge crossings make the display visually cluttered and thus difficult to explore. In this paper, we propose a novel geometry-based edge-clustering framework that can group edges into bundles to reduce the overall edge crossings.

Graph signatures for visual analytics.

We present a visual analytics technique to explore graphs using the concept of a data signature. A data signature, in our context, is a multidimensional vector that captures the local topology information surrounding each graph node. Signature vectors extracted from a graph are projected onto a low-dimensional scatterplot through the use of scaling.

Generating graphs for visual analytics through interactive sketching.

We introduce an interactive graph generator, GreenSketch, designed to facilitate the creation of descriptive graphs required for different visual analytics tasks. The human-centric design approach of GreenSketch enables users to master the creation process without specific training or prior knowledge of graph model theory. The customized user interface encourages users to gain insight into the connection between the compact matrix representation and the topology of a graph layout when they sketch their graphs.