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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/
Posted by InfoVis at April 29, 2007 3:59 PM
