mentegrafica | infovis solutions

1 - When, how and why have you decided to research on infovis ?
I started to work on infovis projects shortly after joining my research group at Purdue. For one of our projects, we had to investigate the potential of using mobile devices for delivering analytic information about our university stadiums network activity during college football games in real-time. This got me working on the issues of information abstraction and representation in a resource-constrained environment. It is this project that initiated me into the field of information
visualization. Initially, I wasnt a big infovis enthusiast. Over the years, however, I gained further interest when I realized that infovis concepts easily move from the research phase to application phase.
Moreover, infovis concepts are being used by a lot of people for practical applications because they really impact ones understanding of information and help gain insight into otherwise visually disorganized data.

2 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?
The current project I am working on is a very interesting as it involves not only just aspects of visualization, but also takes into account human factors. We are trying to gain insight into human cognitive representation of a problem and how do people perceive certain analytical processes. Our further goal is to see if this can be reproduced to build effective visualizations considering the display constraints of a mobile device.

3 - On what themes are you working now ?
We are continuing to work on the general theme of presenting information for analysis on mobile devices. However, weve shifted our domain from sports related visualization to others such as geo-spatial data. Since
geo-spatial data has an inherent visualization aspect to it and mobile devices have become popular for geo-located services, we are experimenting with various techniques to present geo-tagged data. And as mentioned earlier, we are looking at not just plain visualization, but human factors involving the analytical process of geospatial data. Our goal is to develop solutions that can match the principles of "congruence and "apprehension.

4 - If you should suggest an education programme to a studentinterested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?
I think UMD (Ben Shneiderman), UBC (Tamara Munzner), GeorgiaTech and Stanford have some of the well-known Infovis groups and courses present out there. With the hiring of new faculty in the area of infovis, our University (Purdue) is also going to see an increase in infovis related curriculum in the near future.

5 - How do you think infovis researches will evolve in your country for next years ?
The current trend for infovis researches is going to move towards more of supporting analysis to discover unexpected patterns, correlations, etc. An interesting sub-area that is getting attention is the support of
collaborative tools for interaction and visualization. With the popularity of web-based applications (Google maps is a classic example) and desktop applications like Google Earth, geospatial and GIS based infovis has also seen a surge in popularity in the recent days. And, last but not least, with the introduction of high-end phones such as the iPhone, we should hope to see a rise in innovative infovis applications on mobile devices too.