This book discusses semantic interaction, a user interaction methodology for visual analytic applications that more closely couples the visual reasoning processes of people with the computation. This methodology affords user interaction on visual data representations that are native to the domain of the data. User interaction in visual analytics systems is critical to enabling visual data exploration. Interaction transforms people from mere viewers to active participants in the process of analyzing and understanding data. This discourse between people and data enables people to understand aspects of their data, such as structure, patterns, trends, outliers, and other properties that ultimately result in insight. Through interacting with visualizations, users engage in sensemaking, a process of developing and understanding relationships within datasets through foraging and synthesis. The book provides a description of the principles of semantic interaction, providing design guidelines for the integration of semantic interaction into visual analytics, examples of existing technologies that leverage semantic interaction, and a discussion of how to evaluate these technologies. Semantic interaction has the potential to increase the effectiveness of visual analytic technologies and opens possibilities for a fundamentally new design space for user interaction in visual analytics systems.

This book discusses semantic interaction, a user interaction methodology for visual analytic applications that more closely couples the visual reasoning processes of people with the computation. This methodology affords user interaction on visual data representations that are native to the domain of the data. User interaction in visual analytics systems is critical to enabling visual data exploration. Interaction transforms people from mere viewers to active participants in the process of analyzing and understanding data. This discourse between people and data enables people to understand aspects of their data, such as structure, patterns, trends, outliers, and other properties that ultimately result in insight. Through interacting with visualizations, users engage in sensemaking, a process of developing and understanding relationships within datasets through foraging and synthesis. The book provides a description of the principles of semantic interaction, providing design guidelines for the integration of semantic interaction into visual analytics, examples of existing technologies that leverage semantic interaction, and a discussion of how to evaluate these technologies. Semantic interaction has the potential to increase the effectiveness of visual analytic technologies and opens possibilities for a fundamentally new design space for user interaction in visual analytics systems.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, AC 2017, held as part of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2017, which took place in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in July 2017. HCII 2017 received a total of 4340 submissions, of which 1228 papers were accepted for publication after a careful reviewing process. The papers thoroughly cover the entire field of Human-Computer Interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The two volumes set of AC 2017 presents 81 papers which are organized in the following topical sections: electroencephalography and brain activity measurement, eye tracking in augmented cognition, physiological measuring and bio-sensing, machine learning in augmented cognition, cognitive load and performance, adaptive learning systems, brain-computer interfaces, human cognition and behavior in complex tasks and environments.

Visualization has become a valuable means for data exploration and analysis. Interactive visualization combines expressive graphical representations and effective user interaction. Although interaction is an important component of visualization approaches, much of the visualization literature tends to pay more attention to the graphical representation than to interaction. The goal of this work is to strengthen the interaction side of visualization. Based on a brief review of general aspects of interaction, we develop an interaction-oriented view on visualization. This view comprises five key aspects: the data, the tasks, the technology, the human, as well as the implementation. Picking up these aspects individually, we elaborate several interaction methods for visualization. We introduce a multi-threading architecture for efficient interactive exploration. We present interaction techniques for different types of data e.g., multivariate data, spatio-temporal data, graphs) and different visualization tasks (e.g., exploratory navigation, visual comparison, visual editing). With respect to technology, we illustrate approaches that utilize modern interaction modalities (e.g., touch, tangibles, proxemics) as well as classic ones. While the human is important throughout this work, we also consider automatic methods to assist the interactive part. In addition to solutions for individual problems, a major contribution of this work is the overarching view of interaction in visualization as a whole. This includes a critical discussion of interaction, the identification of links between the key aspects of interaction, and the formulation of research topics for future work with a focus on interaction.

Data containing geographical locations and time that associates with natural language texts, such as geotagged tweets, travel blogs, and crime reports are generally recognized as spatiotemporal semantic events. Many research fields have tried to gain valuable insights from these data and there have many techniques and methods are introduced in past decade. In computer science field, the study of spatiotemporal-semantic events in visualization and visual analytics is one of the hottest research topics. Text mining and data mining provide abundant methods to find meaningful knowledge and insights from semantic information of these data. Even though, there exist many contributions in this research field, there still lack of visually intuitive applications and approaches that allow frontline users, such as police, health officers, and social workers to freely navigate, effectively utilize and analyze their spatiotemporal semantic data, especially in community level. In this thesis, multiple visual analytics (VA) solutions are introduced. NeighborVis, CLEVis, and a new lens based visual interaction technique, GTMapLens to help frontline users harness semantic-rich spatiotemporal data. The development of all applications is fulfilled the requirement analysis and initial prototype evaluation. Text mining, topic modeling, hierarchical geospatial data indexing and many new visualization methods are studied and discussed along with those VA systems. The visual design is guided by requirement analysis with a cohort of multidisciplinary domain experts. Evaluation is presented with real world datasets to show the usability and effectiveness.

Visual analytics has come a long way since its inception in 2005. The amount of data in the world today has increased significantly and experts in many domains are struggling to make sense of their data. Visual analytics is helping them conduct their analyses. While software developers have worked for many years to develop software that helps users do their tasks, this task is becoming more and more onerous, as understanding the needs and data used by expert users requires more than some simple usability testing during the development process. The need for a user centered evaluation process was envisioned in Illuminating the Path, the seminal work on visual analytics by James Thomas and Kristin Cook in 2005. We have learned over the intervening years that not only will user-centered evaluation help software developers to turn out products that have more utility, the evaluation efforts can also help point out the direction for future research efforts. This book describes the efforts that go into analysis, including critical thinking, sensemaking, and various analytics techniques learned from the intelligence community. Support for these components is needed in order to provide the most utility for the expert users. There are a good number of techniques for evaluating software that has been developed within the human-computer interaction (HCI) community. While some of these techniques can be used as is, others require modifications. These too are described in the book. An essential point to stress is that the users of the domains for which visual analytics tools are being designed need to be involved in the process. The work they do and the obstacles in their current processes need to be understood in order to determine both the types of evaluations needed and the metrics to use in these evaluations. At this point in time, very few published efforts describe more than informal evaluations. The purpose of this book is to help readers understand the need for more user-centered evaluations to drive both better-designed products and to define areas for future research. Hopefully readers will view this work as an exciting and creative effort and will join the community involved in these efforts.

The emergence of multilayer networks as a concept from the field of complex systems provides many new opportunities for the visualization of network complexity, and has also raised many new exciting challenges. The multilayer network model recognizes that the complexity of relationships between entities in real-world systems is better embraced as several interdependent subsystems (or layers) rather than a simple graph approach. Despite only recently being formalized and defined, this model can be applied to problems in the domains of life sciences, sociology, digital humanities, and more. Within the domain of network visualization there already are many existing systems, which visualize data sets having many characteristics of multilayer networks, and many techniques, which are applicable to their visualization. In this Synthesis Lecture, we provide an overview and structured analysis of contemporary multilayer network visualization. This is not only for researchers in visualization, but also for those who aim to visualize multilayer networks in the domain of complex systems, as well as those solving problems within application domains. We have explored the visualization literature to survey visualization techniques suitable for multilayer network visualization, as well as tools, tasks, and analytic techniques from within application domains. We also identify the research opportunities and examine outstanding challenges for multilayer network visualization along with potential solutions and future research directions for addressing them.