Seminar: Aaron Quigley

Information Visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present abstract data in an explicit form. Such static (pictures) or dynamic presentations help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artefact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visual presentation of data without a physical or geometric form. As such, it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics and visual design.

In this talk Aaron will present a brief history of social-network analysis and visualisation, introduce analysis and layout algorithms he and his students have developed for visualising such data. Our recent analysis focuses on actor identification through network tuning. In addition to our Social Network Assembly Pipeline, SNAP which operates on the premise of “social network inference” where we have studied it experimentally with the analysis of 10,000,000 record sets without explicit relations. Our visualisation has focussed on large scale node-link diagrams, small multiples, dynamic network displays and egocentric layouts. The talk concludes with a number of challenges and open research questions we face as researchers in using visualisation in an attempt to present dynamic data sources.

BIO: Professor Aaron Quigley is the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science in the University of St Andrews. He appointment is part of SICSA and he currently supervises five PhD students. He is the director of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group. His research interests include information visualisation, surface and multi-display computing, human computer interaction and pervasive and ubiquitous computing. He has published over 110 internationally peer-reviewed publications including edited volumes, journal papers, book chapters, conference and workshop papers and holds 3 patents. Aaron is a chartered fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM and is a recipient of the Engineers Australia Excellence in Engineering Education Award.

His research and supervision has been funded by the SFC, SFI, NDRC, IRCSET, NICTA, Smart Internet CRC, IBM and the EU (FP7 and FP6). Aaron was previously director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia and an Associate Professor in the University of Tasmania. Before this he was a College Lecturer in the University College Dublin. While with UCD Aaron a was Co-Principal Investigator for the SFI Clique Strategic Research Cluster on Graph and Network Analysis (including visualisation), an IBM CAS Visiting Scientist, UCD director of ODCSSS, coordinator for the EU FP7 project CAPSIL, a researcher in Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, a collaborator in CLARITY the Centre for Sensor Web Technologies and the UCD PI for Vizi, a collaborative digital technology research project between Twelve Horses, IADT and UCD. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Fellow in the University of Sydney Australia, a visiting research scientist with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge Massachusetts and an Associate Lecturer in the University of Newcastle, Australia.