Angelos’ research attracted attention at international visualization conference

During 21-26 October 2018, the annual IEEE VIS conference took place in Berlin, Germany. VIS is a top-level conference in visualization, visual analytics, and related fields. Several researchers from Linnaeus University participated in the conference, from the ISOVIS and the VAESS research groups.

At VIS 2018 Angelos Chatzimparmpas, who is a doctoral student in computer science and also a member of both these groups, presented a poster that attracted great attention, entitled t-viSNE: A Visual Inspector for the Exploration of t-SNE. Angelos was also one of the few accepted student volunteers at VIS, where he performed several organizational tasks during the conference.

“I focus on visual analytics approaches that can be applied for making smart and/or complex systems more effective, for example. This topic is part of the VAESS research that aims to better understand and engineer complex cyber-physical systems”, says Angelos.

Foundational principles, techniques, and tools

Angelos works with developing foundational visual analytics principles, techniques, and tools for analysing data and models in those systems. Trust into the analysis results will be increased by making the analysis methods and the resulting empirical models transparent for end users. Users will thus be enabled to better predict the behaviour of cyber-physical systems and to reconstruct the underlying models more efficiently when needed.

There are a number of important research questions that need to get answered in this context, for instance: What are the concrete tasks and aims of the concrete analyses? What is the overall analysis workflow and how can it be described? How can we make the black boxes of the analysis methods and resulting models transparent for the user using interactive visualizations, to increase trust?

“These are the questions I work with. I will find answers from a theoretical or conceptual perspective as well as build novel or combine existing visual representations and interaction techniques.”

When coming to Växjö, Angelos said that the most exciting thing about becoming a doctoral student here was the opportunity to collaborate with prominent researchers from Linnaeus University and abroad, to substantially contribute to the research field of visual analytics and to make an impact by improving complex systems used in practice. His experience in Berlin was one of many examples of this.

VAESS is short for Visual Analytics for Engineering Smarter Systems and is a research group within Linnaeus University Centre for Data Intensive Sciences (DISA).