Charles D. (Chad) Stolper
Computer Science Ph.D. Candidate
School of Interactive Computing
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Title: Graph-Level Operations: A High-Level Interface for Graph Visualization Technique Specification

Date: Friday, July 1st, 2016
Time: 7 AM to 10 AM EDT
Location: TSRB 223

Committee
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Dr. John Stasko, School of Interactive Computing (Advisor)
Dr. Polo Chau, School of Computational Science and Engineering (Co-Advisor)
Dr. James Foley, School of Interactive Computing
Dr. Rahul Basole, School of Interactive Computing
Dr. Alex Endert, School of Interactive Computing
Dr. Jarke J. van Wijk, Department of Math and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology

Abstract
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More and more the world is being described as graphs---as connections between people, places, and ideas---since they provide a richer model than simply understanding each item in isolation. In order to help analysts understand these graphs, researchers have developed and studied a large number of graph visualization techniques. This variety of techniques presents solutions to a breadth of graph analysis tasks, but it introduces a new issue: complexity. The variety introduces both the complexity of comparing techniques in an objective way and the engineering complexity of implementing so many techniques.

In my thesis, I present the graph-level operations model (or GLO model) as an elegant solution to these challenges. The GLO model consists of a model of visual elements and a set of functions (GLOs) that manipulate those elements. I further introduce GLOv2, an instance of the GLO model derived from twenty-nine graph visualization seed techniques from literature. I show how to use the model to define graph visualization techniques, including the original seed techniques as well as novel techniques. I demonstrate the analysis potential of the GLO model by clustering the twenty-nine seed techniques using two different GLO-based schemes. Finally, I demonstrate the practical engineering potential of the model through a Javascript implementation (GLO.js) and two applications built atop the implementation for exploring a graph and discovering novel techniques using GLOs (GLO-STIX and GLO-CLI).