News
Best Paper Award at VDS 2024
Our paper "Visualization and Automation in Data Science: Exploring the Paradox of Humans-in-the-Loop" co-authored by Prof. Andreas Kerren has received the Best Paper Award at VDS 2024, the 10th IEEE Symposium on Visualization in Data Science, held online on October 13, 2024 due to Hurricane Milton (originally planned to take place in St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA).
iVis Group at DDLS/WASP/WASP-HS 2024 Joint Conference
Prof. Kerren and Dr. Kucher have attended a DDLS/WASP/WASP-HS 2024 Joint Conference titled "The Disruptive Role of Data and AI in the Life Sciences" in Gothenburg during September 24–25, 2024. Prof. Kerren has presented our WASP-DDLS project "Visual Analytics for Enhancing Quality and Trust in Genome-wide Expression Clustering and Annotation" and participated in the panel on common research challenges.
iVis-VA Reading Group
During the autumn term 2024, the iVis group is initiating a reading group with a Visual Analytics (VA) focus. The plan is to start with some theoretical papers and transition into discussing contributions in both VA theory and practice from venues such as IEEE VIS, EuroVis, TVCG, CGF, CG&A. Everyone interested in the topic is welcome to join. PhD students at LiU will be able to get course credits for active participation. Further information is available on the public web page.
GD 2025 Hosted by iVis Group in Norrköping
The 33rd International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2025) will be held in Norrköping, Sweden from September 24–26, 2025. A pre-conference PhD school will take place on September 22–23, 2025. Prof. Kerren and Dr. Kucher will serve as general co-chairs. The website of the conference is already online at https://graphdrawing.github.io/gd2025/ and will soon be populated with more detailed information.
Featured Article in the May/June 2024 issue of IEEE CG&A
Our paper Visualization for Trust in Machine Learning Revisited: The State of the Field in 2023, co-authored by Dr. Angelos Chatzimparmpas, Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher, and Prof. Andreas Kerren, has been selected as the spotlight article of the CG&A May/June 2024 issue and is free-to-view. The CG&A Editor-in-Chief summarizes our paper as follows: "Their results corroborate the rapidly growing trend of visualization techniques for increasing trust in machine learning models in the past three years, with visualization found to help improve popular model explainability methods and new deep learning architectures. The article is another example of articles discussing the state of the art and identifying challenges for the research community to work on."
Further information is available on the CG&A website for this issue.
EuroVis Best PhD Dissertation Award 2024
Dr. Angelos Chatzimparmpas, former PhD student of Prof. Kerren with the ISOVIS group at Linnaeus University, was awarded the EuroVis Best PhD Dissertation Award 2024 at EuroVis '24 for his dissertation "Visual analytics for Explainable and Trustworthy Machine Learning", which was also previously selected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) 100-list in 2023.
Further information is available in the LNU website announcement.
iVis Group at EuroVis 2024
The iVis group members have attended EuroVis '24 in Odense, Denmark during May 27–31, 2024. We and our collaborators have presented a range of contributions (from a STAR and an invited CGF article to short papers, posters, and workshop papers), organized and participated in the panel discussion on sonification + visualization, and served as chairs for several conference tracks.
Participation at Norrköping Tech Day 2024
On May 21, Dr. Katerina Vrotsou and Dr. Nico Reski (together with Carlo Navarra from the Department of Thematic Studies - Environmental Change) participated at Norrköping Tech Day 2024: Visualization and AI. As part of the event's public exhibition, they presented and demonstrated the Virtual Reality interface developed within the research project Immersive Analytics for Urban Heat, engaging in various interesting conversations with the on-site attendees. Among others, the event also featured keynotes by Anders Ynnerman (LiU), Amy Loutfi (ORU, LiU), and Anders Ölme (NVIDIA). Norrköping Tech Day 2024 was hosted by Norrköping Science Park, LEAD, and Visualization Center C. We thank Erik Holmstedt (Norrköping Science Park) for his invitation and the opportunity to present our research at the event.
iVis Group at Swedish Climate Symposium 2024
On May 17, Dr. Nico Reski presented an abstract titled Immersive Analytics for Urban Heat: Towards an Immersive Contextual Urban Climate Analysis Platform, and written together with Prof. Dr. Andreas Kerren and Dr. Katerina Vrotsou (among the co-authors), at the 2nd Swedish Climate Symposium - Climate Research: Science, Society, Responses. The presentation, held as part of the session on Climate Services at the symposium, describes the ongoing research conducted as part of the project Immersive Analytics for Urban Heat, funded by the Norrköping Fund for Research and Development. The symposium was hosted by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), the Strategic Research Areas MERGE and BECC, and the Bolin Centre for Climate Research, and took place in Norrköping, Sweden, May 15-17, 2024.
Abstract Presentation at ENFSI Seminar "Visualizing the Future"
On May 17, Philip Engström (ITN Senior Research Coordinator) presented an abstract titled Towards an immersive analytics environment for forensics science, written together with Dr. Katerina Vrotsou, Dr. Lonni Besançon, and Dr. Nico Reski, at the seminar Visualizing the Future. The presentation highlights some of the recent work conducted in our research group, and outlines potential use cases for application within the context of forensics science. The seminar was hosted as a One Day, One Subject Seminar by the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI) and took place in Dundee, Scotland, May 16-17, 2024.
Presentation at Workshop: Building Future Society with the Help of Digital Twins
On May 15, Felicia Lai Jacobsson (Visual Sweden) and Jenny Carlstedt (RISE) hosted a workshop titled Bygg framtidens samhällen med inspiration och hjälp av digitala tvillingar. The workshop was coordinated together with the National Hub for Digital Twins, and invited municipal representatives to listen to a selection of ongoing research efforts at Linköping University that are related to digital twins. Among other presenters, Dr. Katerina Vrotsou held a presentation about the project Immersive Analytics for Urban Heat, while Dr. Nico Reski provided a hands-on demo of the project's Virtual Reality interface to the on-site attendees. The workshop was held in the Visualization Center C, Norrköping, Sweden, May 15, 2024.
Invited Talk at Police Conference
On April 17, Dr. Kucher joined Philip Engström (ITN Senior Research Coordinator) in giving an invited talk at the Swedish Police UGI IT Conference in Stockholm. Philip presented the new Data-Driven Development educational programme, while Kostiantyn gave an overview of the research carried out in our unit that is relevant to data-driven development and data analytics.
Associate Chair at IVAPP 2025
Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher will serve as an associate chair with a focus on information visualization at the 16th International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications (IVAPP), which will take place in Porto, Portugal during 26–28 February, 2025.
Please note that the regular paper submission deadline for IVAPP 2025 is October 2, 2024, and for position papers, it is November 13, 2024 (further information).
2024 ELLIIT Annual Workshop in Lund
Jinyi Wang, our PhD student working in the research project Visual Analytics of Large and Complex Multilayer Technological Networks and supervised by Prof. Kerren, Dr. Kucher, and Dr. Pates (LU) has recently presented a poster on the project and her work at the 2024 ELLIIT Annual Workshop which took place in Lund, March 7-8, 2024.
ELLIIT Focus Period on Visualization + AI for Spring 2025
The ELLIIT Focus Period proposal by Prof. Kerren, Dr. Vrotsou, and Dr. Kucher titled "Visualization-Empowered Human-in-the-Loop Artificial Intelligence" has been approved for spring 2025. As the ELLIIT website describes this opportunity, "The most important instrument for the ELLIIT guest program is the 5-week focus period, organized twice a year at one of the ELLIIT universities.". The focus period will provide an opportunity to foster discussion on visual analytics in relation to (X)AI, including human-in-the-loop AI/ML, by inviting younger as well as senior international researchers for a stay at MIT/LiU as well as organizing a 3-day symposium on this topic. Further information is now available in the focus period website.
PhD Thesis Defense
On Tuesday, December 12, 2023, Magnus Nylin will defend his PhD thesis in Design (Room K3, Norrköping, 09:15). The thesis is entitled Flexible Automation in Air Traffic Control Through Adaptation of Human-Automation Collaboration. Dr. Ruth Stilwell (Norwich University and Aerospace Policy Solutions LLC, USA) will serve as the opponent.
Special Issue on Visualization of Machine Learning Models
Prof. Andreas Kerren is co-editing a special issue on Visualizing the Unseen Characteristics of Machine Learning Models of the Frontiers in Computer Science journal / Computer Graphics and Visualization section. Manuscript summary submission deadline is on February 29, 2024, and the complete manuscript submission deadline is on May 31, 2024.
STAR and Poster Co-chairs at EuroVis 2024
Prof. Andreas Kerren will serve as a State-of-the-Art (STAR) track co-chair and Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher will serve as a Poster track co-chair at EuroVis 2024, which will take place in Odense, Denmark during 27–31 May, 2024.
MIP Award Co-chair at IEEE VISSOFT 2023
Prof. Andreas Kerren will serve as Most Influential Paper (MIP) Award co-chair of the 11th IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2023), which will take place in Bogotá, Colombia during 01–02 October, 2023.
Associate Chair at IVAPP 2024
Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher will serve as an associate chair with a focus on information visualization at the 15th International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications (IVAPP), which will take place in Rome, Italy during 27–29 February, 2024.
Please note that the regular paper submission deadline for IVAPP 2024 is October 9, 2023, and for position papers, it is November 17, 2023 (further information).
Special Issue on Visual Analytics
Dr. Katerina Vrotsou and Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher are co-editing a special issue on Visual Analytics: Techniques and Applications of the Analytics journal (MDPI). Paper submission deadline is on November 30, 2023 November 30, 2024.
Best Reviewer Award at EuroVis 2023
In addition to the conference presentations described below, Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher has received the Best Reviewer Award at EuroVis 2023 in Leipzig.
iVis Group at EuroVis 2023
Prof. Andreas Kerren, Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher, and Zeyang Huang represented the iVis Group at EuroVis 2023 in Leipzig, Germany during June 12–16, 2023.
Zeyang Huang and Dr. Kucher (with Prof. Kerren among the co-authors) presented a STAR (survey article) titled "VA + Embeddings STAR: A State-of-the-Art Report on the Use of Embeddings in Visual Analytics"; and Dr. Angelos Chatzimparmpas (with Prof. Kerren among the co-authors) presented an invited CGF article titled "HardVis: Visual Analytics to Handle Instance Hardness Using Undersampling and Oversampling Techniques".
Additionally, Dr. Jorji Nonaka (with Dr. Takanori Fujiwara among the co-authors) presented a workshop paper titled "Reflections on the Developments of Visual Analytics Systems for the K Computer System Log Data" at VisGap '23.
VA+Embeddings Browser is Publicly Available Online
VA+Embeddings Browser, our visual survey of the use of embedding approaches in visual analytics, is now publicly available online:
The respective survey article (state-of-the-art report) will be presented at the STAR track of EuroVis 2023.
iVis Group at IEEE PacificVis 2023
Prof. Andreas Kerren, Dr. Takanori Fujiwara, and Peilin Yu represented the iVis Group at IEEE PacificVis 2023 in Seoul, Korea during April 18–21, 2023.
Prof. Kerren gave an invited talk at the VisMeetsAI '23 workshop (see the previous news item), where Dr. Fujiwara served as a co-organizer.
Peilin Yu (with Dr. Katerina Vrotsou among the co-authors) presented a paper titled "Interactive Transformations and Visual Assessment of Noisy Event Sequences: An Application in En-Route Air Traffic Control"; and Dr. Fujiwara presented a paper titled "Feature Learning for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction toward Maximal Extraction of Hidden Patterns".
Daniel Witschard (with Dr. Kostiantyn Kucher and Prof. Kerren among the co-authors) presented a short paper (the "Visualization Notes" track at PacificVis) titled "Optimizing Embedding-based Network Reconstruction"; and Dr. Angelos Chatzimparmpas (with Prof. Kerren among the co-authors) presented a short paper titled "MetaStackVis: Visually-Assisted Performance Evaluation of Metamodels".
Additionally, Dr. Tanja Blascheck (with Dr. Lonni Besançon among the co-authors) presented a paper titled "Studies of Part-to-Whole Glanceable Visualizations on Smartwatch Faces".
Invited Speaker at the VisMeetsAI '23 Workshop
Prof. Andreas Kerren will give an invited talk entitled "Visualization Perspectives in Explainable and Trustworthy Machine Learning" at the PacificVis 2023 Visualization Meets AI Workshop (VisMeetsAI '23), Seoul, Korea, April 18, 2023.
Open PhD Position in Information Visualization and Visual Analytics
We have one open PhD position to be filled in the area of Information Visualization / Visual Analytics with a focus on web-based visualization of large and complex, multilayer networks (with applications to the power systems domain)! The position will be funded by the ELLIIT grant "Visual Analytics of Large and Complex Multilayer Technological Networks" (see below). More information about prerequisites, merits and the application procedure is provided here under the reference number LiU-2022-05261. Questions should be addressed via email to Prof. Andreas Kerren.
Deadline: February 6, 2023