« February 2007 | Main | May 2007 »
April 29, 2007
An interview with...Riccardo Mazza
Here you are some thoughts from Riccardo Mazza, the author of one of the latest Italian books about infovis working as a phD at University of Lugano.
1 - When, how and why have you decided to research on infovis ?
I started my research on infovis during my Ph.D study at the Faculty of Communication Sciences in Lugano. The main goal of my Ph.D. research was to support instructors in Distance Learning environments with useful tools and indicators to monitoring the students learning. I studied different approaches (Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Fuzzy logic, ...), but at the end I decided to explore infovis techniques to graphically represent students tracking data from distance learning environments. Differently from other approaches, infovis give to the instructor the freedom to interpret the data. Insights are inferred in the instructors mind, not suggested by pre-defined algorithms. I liked this approach, and apparently the community approved this choice.
2 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?
I have worked in several projects, mostly on the fields of infovis and/or distance learning.
An interesting one is the follow-up of my Ph.D. work, in which we implemented an infovis tool for the monitoring of students for a very well-known Open Source distance learning system: Moodle.
The tool is called GISMO, and its freely available under GNU license at the url: http://gismo.sourceforge.net.
GISMO generates graphical representations that can be explored by course instructors to examine various aspects of distance students.
It uses the students tracking data from Moodle, and generates graphical representations that can be explored and manipulated by course instructors to examine social, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of distance students.
It enables instructors to identify tendencies in their classes, or to quickly discover individuals who need special attention. GISMO has been downloaded more then 2000 times (in 2 years), and we are continually getting suggestion for improvements from the users.
I must say that we are very proud of this.
3 - On what themes are you working now ?
Currently, Im involved in a Swiss project that aim to build a eLearning course on Visual Literacy.
It considers visualizations in three different domains: Communication, Engineering, and Business.
The didactic approach consists of rooting visualization in its application contexts, i.e. giving students the necessary critical attitude, principles, tools and feedback to develop their own high-quality visualization formats for specific problems (problem-based learning).
The students thus learn about the commonalities of good visualization in diverse areas, but also explore the specificities of visualization in their field of specialization (through real-life case studies).
They will not only learn by doing, but in doing so contribute new training material for their peers to evaluate (peer learning).
A demo of this course is available at the URL: http://www.visual-literacy.org.
4 - If you should suggest an education programme to a student interested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?
Mhhh, tricky question.
Traditionally, the scientific area most close to infovis is the Human-Computer Interaction.
To my knowledge, very few universities in Europe offer a specific course in infovis (I do this at the University of Lugano).
Students seriously interested in infovis study should enroll to a master programme in USA.
5 - How do you think infovis researches will evolve in your country for next years ?
Everybody in the community agrees that infovis will have a more important role in everyday life in next years.
The availability of different devices (mobile, desktop, PDA, iPod, ...) and the necessity to make these interfaces more user friendly, will increase the researchers attention toward these aspects.
http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/04/29/an-interview-withriccardo-mazza/
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 3:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2007
Infovis and football
Today Inter FC lost his first match in the serieA season.
So, just to have a deep sight into this event, I used LiveMatch, a new online actionscript based tool by "La Gazzetta dello Sport ( the biggest sport daily newspaper in Italy ) that helps to visualize and compare ( also LIVE ) teams during a football match.
I grabbed some screenshots and, as usual, I posted them on Flickr.
Here a small preview
http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/04/18/infovis-and-football/
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 9:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2007
The map of
In the italian blogoshpere there is a blog that takes care about big and contraddiction problems in Italy.
It also offers new, innovative services to make users understadning what is around them.
During the last month it offered an interesting actionscript web based infovis solution called "La mappa del potere ( the Italian for "The map of the power) that displays connections among very few people and big italian public companies...
Among other features its possibile to search for a single person, discover each persons relations among companies and relation among companies through shared people...
This is a small preview of a map generated by me
I collected some screenshots on Flickr but a more interesting video is available here ( only in Italian ) that helps to understand how to use the infovis tool.
http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/04/17/the-map-of-italian-connections-on-national-economy/
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 8:48 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2007
An interview with...Scopia Visual Interfaces Systems
Today we are listening to Scopia Visual Interface Systems, a very young spanish company.
1 - When, how and why have you decided to start up a company focusing on infovis ?
It was decided about summer 2006, less that a year ago. The idea came from 3 people, ourselves, that by the time were doing some experiments mostly in the 3D scene. We saw that there was still a big room for data visualization, specially in our country (Spain). And therefore we decided to start a small company to develop some initial tools for commercial use. So by the end of last year we started building the company and here we are, four months later, showing our first tools.
2 - What are your education backgrounds and previous epxeriences before creating your company ?
We come from different areas of knowledge. Engineering, design, consulting, art ... we even have a sculptor 
Some of us have previous experience running a company and others are too young for that. But we are still a very small group, in fact 4.5 people. So there is no much to talk about. Lets say we have a good programmer, two good designers, a experienced consultor and a crazy guy
3 - Which is the best results your customers got using your infovis services and/or products ?
We are still finishing our products and we only have the experiences from the users at our free service macro.scopia.es. We plan to start offering our tools in the next days to organizations like museums, financial entities, education centers and public administration.
4 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?
The most exciting tool we have developed so far is "fricker. A 3D data browsing tool we have tested for things like browsing the filesystem. You can watch a video here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1942397549540648643&hl=es
or go to our site http://www.scopia.es/fricker.html for a high res avi file. But we realised that this approach might be too "futuristic to start a comercial development, so we decided to start a more traditional web tool with a small set of visualizations. Thats what we call macro.scopia, and thats the kind of product we will be selling in the next months. But of course we will use any chance to apply frickers technology and continue developing it as soon as possible.
5 - On what themes are you working now ?
We are finishing our web based system to start deploying it soon. And of course we are always thinking of new views of the data that could be integrated into macro.scopia. But basicaly we are now going through the less exciting but needed task of contacting customers.
6 - How do you think infovis solutions market will evolve in your country for next years ?
We hope a small company will success and grow making this data views popular At least we think that it can be easily introduced into museums and libraries. They are interested in making data easier to browse. So we all have a chance to change the way they show their knowledge to the public. Hopefully we will start seeing these new interfaces in their websites and information points soon.
And of course, in the internet mass of blogs and publications, we would like to see them using our free tools as we make them better and easier.
7 - If you should suggest an education programme to a student interested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?
Well, as I said before, we are a very heterogeneous group. Thats always better than one single person trying to know everything. So I would recommend to study any of the related fields like math, computer science or design, and then get into the stuff to learn as much of the rest as possible. You always have to know a bit of everything, but while being good at a certain thing. I have chosen programming and computer science, so thats what I (The programming guy) would suggest.
infoVis / information visualization / infoviz, Interviews, Profiles, resources, User Experience, User Interfaceshttp://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/04/12/an-interview-withscopia-visual-interfaces-systems/
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 6:49 PM | Comments (0)
April 4, 2007
Infovis through new ideas and experiments
Browsing the infovis feeds collected during these years, I spent a bit of time in exploring the interesting solutions proposed by Moritz Stefaner ( we talked with him some monthes ago ).
Among others, I think that elastic lists are very interesting solutions to display multi-facetted data structures, because they offer 5 key added values:
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 9:49 AM | Comments (0)
Mobile Guide for Milan designweek
As last year, we are proud to bring the mobile guide to all Design Events in Milan during the Fuorisalone ( 16-23 april, 2007 ).
This year the aim is to get more users than the year before in order to better understand their needs and the issues of using mobile guide for very tight and different events.
I invite all of you to live the designweek in Milan, and join us the on-the-go parties all around the city in the next days.
We also want to thank Nokia for supporting us ( mentegrafica, studiolabo and jusan network ) on this initiative.
http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/04/04/mobile-guide-for-milan-designweek/
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 8:56 AM | Comments (0)
