Intelligent Icons: Integrating Lite-Weight Data Mining and Visualization into GUI Operating Systems

The vast majority of visualization tools introduced so far are specialized pieces of software that run explicitly on a particular dataset at a particular time for a particular purpose. In this work we introduce a novel framework for allowing visualization to take place in the background of normal day-to-day operation of any GUI based operation system. Our system works by replacing the standard file icons with automatically created icons that reflect the contents of the files in a principled way. We call such icons Intelligent Icons. The utility of Intelligent Icons is further enhanced by arranging them in a way that reflects their similarity/differences. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on diverse applications.