The group activities comprise research and teaching in information visualization, visual analytics, and user-centered design. Visual analytics is the combination of automated data analysis and machine learning techniques with the must adequate interactive visualization approach. User-centered design focuses the design and prototyping of techniques and systems to user requirements and capabilities in their context and for their tasks.
Research
Our research group at GRIS addresses these problems with a clear focus on visualization, interaction, and human factors. We follow the overall goal to enable data scientists AND end users (without in-depth knowledge in data science) to participate in all aspects of the analytics and decision making processes. Our goal is to open the black box of automated techniques and machine learning for experts (eXplainable AI, xAI) or end users (acceptable AI). Visual-interactive interfaces based on the theories and applications in information visualization and visual analytics can be conflated with best practices in traditional data analysis and machine learning. In this respect, we especially investigate human factors in analysis and decision making process with the goal to design better visual-interactive interfaces, leading to a more user-centered analytics process.
Visual Analytics inherently focuses on large and complex data sets such as
• time series (e.g., treatment data, sensor data, and many other observations over time)
• various health care records (e.g., patient data, cohort data, or omics features)
• multivariate data (e.g., engineering data or socioeconomic data)
• graphs (e.g., contact networks or IT networks)
Our application areas that we pursue together with the IGD departments information visualization and visual analytics (IVA), visual health technologies (VHT), industrial engineering technologies (IET), and others, include cyber-security, health, and engineering.
Teaching
We offer the following lectures and seminars:
• Lecture+exercise: Information Visualization and Visual Analytics (IVVA) – each winter semester
• Lecture: User-Centered Design in Visual Computing (UCD) – each summer semester
• Seminar: Visual Analytics – each summer semester
Student projects and theses
We offer bachelor theses, programming practicums, master theses and employment as student researchers. Please contact Jörn Kohlhammer if you are interested in such collaboration on any of the topics outlined here.
