Data-Driven Discoveries: Pushing Visualization Research Further

Data visualization is ubiquitous in today's society. In the last decade, research in the field has increased tremendously, and the research community has pushed the state of the art in many novel directions. In 2014, the IEEE VIS Conference celebrated its 25th year and grew to incorporate new symposia on large-scale data analysis and visualization (LDAV) and biological visualizations (BioVis). It also featured an increasingly popular art program (VISAP) and an impressive array of workshops and tutorials. The VIS 2014 workshop program, through eight extremely well attended half-day and full-day events, offered a unique peak at emerging research topics in the field of data visualization. This special issue samples contributions made to these workshops by showcasing two research pieces that aim at pushing the state of the art to enable data-driven discoveries with visualization.