Introduction to the Minitrack on Interactive Visual Decision Analytics

The topic of this minitrack, Interactive Visual Data Analytics (IVDA), has applications in a broad range of situations where human expertise must be brought to bear on problems characterized by massive datasets and data that are uncertain in fact, relevance, location in space and position in time. Examples include environmental science and technologies, natural resources and energy, health and related life sciences, precision medicine, safety and security (aircraft safety, law enforcement, antiterrorism, disaster relief) and business processes. This year we are highlighting a broad range of analytic tasks such as natural disaster response, IT and network security, decision support frameworks, event management and preparation, and other domains where interactive visualization systems may be used to improve human decision-making. Key research challenges of interest in this area include studies of visual analytics and decision support in the context of an organization (e.g., IT and crowd control), how to successfully address and tailor analytic systems to solve realworld problems and integrate efficiently into workflows, perceptual and cognitive aspects of the analytic task, novel interaction and visual representations, and collaborative analysis using visual information systems. The focus in this minitrack goes beyond analytics to include rich, powerful visualization techniques for turning data into actionable information. These rich, interactive visual analytic environments offer even greater power and promise to solve big data problems for data that is 'big' in any of the dimensions of variability, velocity, or volume. This minitrack builds upon earlier HICSS minitracks on visual analytics, mobile computing, and digital media at scale, focusing more decision analytics in various applications from business to science, natural disasters, public safety, and policy. The papers are briefly summarized.