ITCS 8010/6010 - 092
Information Visualization
- Spring 2007

Prof. Jing Yang
Office: STECH 435C, Phone: 704-687-8375, email: jyang13@uncc.edu

Meeting Times: R 6:30 - 9:15 pm, Woodward Hall 441

Office Hour: Monday 3:00 - 4:00 pm, Woodward Hall 435C

Course Description (catalog description): 

Information visualization concepts, theories, design principles, popular techniques, evaluation methods, and information visualization applications. (Spring)

General Information:

Information visualization is the science that unveils the underlying structure of abstract data sets using visual representations that utilize the powerful processing capabilities of the human visual perceptual system.

Topics of this course include a) visual perception, cognitive issues, as well as other theory and design principles behind information visualization; b) popular multidimensional visualization techniques such as parallel coordinates, scatterplot matrixes and glyphs; popular hierarchy and graph visualization techniques such as the treemap; c) basic interaction techniques such as selection and distortion; evaluation; and d) examples of information visualization applications and systems, such as bio-information visualization, document visualization and multimedia library visualization.

The exact selection of topics is driven by three criteria: (1) essentials that must be covered, (2) advances in research, and (3) the interests of the participants.

Objectives of the course:

This course will help students build basic concepts and learn popular techniques and applications of information visualization.

Means of student evaluation 

Critiques:30%, Presentations: 30%, Projects: 20%, Class Participation: 20%.
90-100% of total grade - A
80-90% of total grade - B or better.
70-80% of total grade - C or better.
60-70% of total grade - D or better.

1) Critiques:  This course is reading intensive. The instructor will assign reading tasks to the students in the following approaches: a. The teacher will distributes papers to students each week and ask the students to write critiques on the papers and turn the critiques in the next weeks. The teacher will grade the critiques and give feedbacks on them in the weeks followed. The grades on the critiques will greatly affect the final grades. Regarding to the critiques, the teacher will give several questions related to the papers for students to answer in the critiques. Students are encouraged put their own thinking about the paper into the critiques.  b. The teacher will give some topics and ask students to find papers on those topics. Students will be asked to write critiques and sometimes give presentations on the papers they find.

b) Presentations: Each student will give an in-class 10-minute presentation every two weeks. Students are required to send the presentation topics to the teacher one day before their presentation. Students will get the teacher's feedback on their slides if they send the slides to the teacher one day before the presentation.  

c) Project: The students will be required to implement one information visualization prototype to practice what they learn in class. The students are not required to know OpenGL before they take this course since all the basic drawing elements will be provided to them (they can do the projects from scratch though). The students will be asked to present their projects in class.

Here is a list of sample projects:

1) Build simple a file browser;

2) Implement a parallel coordinate display;

3) Implement a glyph display.

d) Class participation: There will be lots of in-class discussions in the classes. Students' performance in the discussions will also greatly affect their final grade. 

*Attendance Policy*

Attendance of all scheduled classes is mandatory. 5% of total grade will be deducted for every class that you are absent, unless a good reason is given.

*Late policy*

Critiques: The full score of each critique assignment is 100 points. You will be deducted 10 points for each day delayed. 

Academic Integrity

Unless otherwise specified, the UNC Charlotte guidelines on Academic Integrity fully apply to all work in this course. This includes critique and programming assignments.

Textbook

Recommended textbook:  Spence, Robert. Information Visualization. Addison-Wesley.

In addition, many recent papers in the field will be read in the class. The papers will be provided by the teacher.

Also, the teacher will circulate a set of useful reference books within the class. Here is a list of the books:

  1. Ware, Colin. Information Visualization: Perception for Design (2nd Edition). Morgan-Kaufmann, 2004. 
  2. Tufte, Edward. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd Edition). Graphics Press, 2001.
  3. Tufte, Edward. Envisioning Information. Graphics Press, 1990.
  4. Tufte, Edward. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Graphics Press, 1997.

Useful Resources

1. Dr. Daniel Keim’s tutorials

 http://dbvis.inf.uni-konstanz.de/group/get_tutorials.php?name=keim

2. Dr. George Robertson's tutorials

 http://research.microsoft.com/~ggr/pubs.htm

3. Dr. John Stasko's Information Visualization course materials

http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2006/cs7450_spring/index.html

4. XmdvTool homepage

http://davis.wpi.edu/~xmdv/

 Software

Two existing information visualization prototypes will be provided to the students for developing their projects. One was written in java and another was written in C++. Basic input, output and drawing functions are provided in them. Students can select one of them and build their projects on it. They can also build their project from scratch using any C++ or Java environment. 

 

Schedule

 Week  Dates Class Topic
1 Jan 11 Introduction 1
2 Jan 18 Introduction 2
3 Jan 25 Multivariate Visualization Technique 1
4 Feb 1 Multivariate Visualization Technique 2, Tree Visualization 1
5 Feb 8 Tree Visualization 2
6 Feb 15 Time series data
7 Feb 22 Project Proposal Presentation, Graph visualization 1
8 Mar 1 Graph visualization 2
9 Mar 8 No Class
10 Mar 15 Interaction
11 Mar 22 Evaluation
12 Mar 29 Project progress presentation
13 Apr 5 A framework for multi-resolution visualizations
14 Apr 12 Application 1
15 Apr 19 Application 2
16 Apr 26 Project presentation

Note: The course schedule might be changed.