Speaker: 

Alex Endert
Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech

Title:

Toward Interactive Visual Affordances for Visual Analytics

Abstract:

An affordance is an object in the physical world, that when perceived by a person, invokes cognitive processes that lead to the planning and execution of action to accomplish some task. In visualization, we often create visual artifacts from data that invoke similar processes of analytical reasoning, hypothesis formation, and knowledge discovery. Humans can observe trends, patterns, outliers, and other visually-salient data characteristics through visualization. I posit that we can transform visual analytics through creating interactive visual affordances. That is, to enable users to interact directly with the visual glyphs and representations created from the data or data model. In this talk, I’ll highlight some of the work from my students and I towards such techniques.

Bio:

Alex Endert is is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He directs the Visual Analytics Lab, where him and his students explore novel user interaction techniques for visual analytics. He is an active contributor to venues for human-computer interaction and information visualization (ACM CHI, IEEE VIS, IEEE TVCG, IEEE CG&A). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Virginia Tech in 2012, advised by Dr. Chris North. In 2013, his work on Semantic Interaction was awarded the IEEE VGTC VPG Pioneers Group Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the Virginia Tech Computer Science Best Dissertation Award.