Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Dynamic networks are a common phenomena across domains, including the social sciences and history (e.g. friendship networks, messaging networks), archeology (e.g. artifact networks, trading networks), and neuroscience (e.g. brain connectivity networks), and many others. Visualizing change in those networks helps experts in these domains to better understand their data and to inform proper analysis methods for further investigation. On the other side, experts facing the problem of presenting their insights into the data to colleagues and collaborators.  

 

In this talk I present some of my recent work addressing challenges in visualizing and presenting dynamic networks and temporal data. I will demo interactive and explorative visualizations for dynamic networks [1,2] and will present a model that allows to generalize some of the gained insights to other temporal data sets [3] such as videos, geo-spatial data, or multi-dimensional data. I will further present a generic visualization technique to visualize the extend of change, evolution, and repetition in any more complex temporal data set [4]. Finally, I present a method to visually communicate changes observed in networks [5]. The method is inspired by the way comics works and, since hand-sketched, can be used in cases where data is not at hand, e.g. to illustrate hypotheses about possible changes. 

 

 

[1] Benjamin Bach, Emmanuel Pietriega, Jean-Daniel Fekete: Visualizing Dynamic Networks with Matrix Cubes, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Toronto, Canada, 2014, Pages 877-886. 

 

[2] Benjamin Bach, Nathalie Henry Riche, Tim Dwyer, Tara Madhayastha, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Tom Grabowski: Small MultiPiles: Piling Time to Explore Temporal Patterns in Dynamic Networks,Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis), 2015

 

[3] Benjamin Bach, Pierre Dragicevic, Daniel Archambault, Christophe Hurter, Sheelagh Carpendale: A Review of Temporal Data Visualizations Based on Space-Time Cube Operations, Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis), 2014, Pages 23-41. 

 

[4] Benjamin Bach, Conglei Shi, Nicolas Heulot, Tara Madhayastha, Tom Grabowski, Pierre Dragicevic: Time Curves: Folding Time to Visualize Patterns of Temporal Evolution in Data, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2016

 

[5] Benjamin Bach, Nathalie Kerracher, Kyle Wm. Hall, Sheelagh Carpendale, Jessie Kennedy, Nathalie Henry Riche: Telling Stories about Dynamic Networks with Graph Comics, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Information Systems (CHI), 2016