VIS 2013 Capstone Speaker: Information Visualization: Challenges and Opportunities

Summary form only given. In the past decades many new techniques have been developed to visualize and interact with abstract data, but also, many challenges remain. In my talk I will reflect on how to make progress in our field: how to identify interesting problems and next how to find effective solutions. I will begin with an attempt to identify characteristics of interesting problems, and discuss windows of opportunity for data, tasks, and users. Some problems have been solved, some are too hard to deal with, what is the range we should aim at? And what impact can be obtained? Next, I discuss strategies and approaches for finding novel solutions, such as combining existing approaches and finding inspiration in other disciplines, including art and design. This talk is based on lessons we learned while developing new techniques, and will be illustrated with a variety of cases and demos from our group at TU/e, showing successes and failures.