Visual Informatics最新文献

Augmented reality is gaining traction across many domains. One of these is participation within geo-spatial planning projects. The interactive and three-dimensional nature of augmented reality is suitably placed to cater for a higher quality of communication and information exchange in planning processes. Thus, this research provides an overview of the use of AR in planning processes, specifically regarding the participation aspect, through an open-access systematic literature review, for which the investigation identifies 35 articles concerning the current state-of-the-art of augmented reality in planning. Findings indicate the rather limited use of augmented reality in the overall planning process due to technical limitations. Nonetheless, it shows to be a useful technology where it allows for higher user engagement and a clearer understanding among users in planning projects. Additionally, in participation, the technology offers a motivational solution and creates an overall higher acceptance and awareness of the plan, making the participants more engaged and represented in the planning process.

This paper proposes a generative approach for the automatic typesetting of books in desktop publishing. The presented system consists in a computer script that operates inside a widely used design software tool and implements a generative process based on several typographic rules, styles and principles which have been identified in the literature. The performance of the proposed system is tested through an experiment which included the evaluation of its outputs with people. The results reveal the ability of the system to consistently create varied book designs from the same input content as well as visually coherent book designs with different contents while complying with fundamental typographic principles.

Current deep learning approaches are cutting-edge methods for solving classification tasks. Arising transfer learning techniques allows applying large generic model to simple tasks whereas simpler models could be used. Large models raise the major problem of their memory consumption and processor usage and lead to a prohibitive ecological footprint. In that paper, we present a novel visual analytics approach to interactively prune those networks and thus limit that issue. Our technique leverages a novel sparkline matrix visualization technique as well as a novel local metric which evaluates the discriminatory power of a filter to guide the pruning process and make it interpretable. We assess the well- founded of our approach through two realistic case studies and a user study. For both of them, the interactive refinement of the model led to a significantly smaller model having similar prediction accuracy than the original one.

Given a large number of applications and complex processing procedures, how to efficiently shift and schedule tax officers to provide good services to taxpayers is now receiving more attention from tax authorities. The availability of historical application data makes it possible for tax managers to shift and schedule staff with data support, but it is unclear how to properly leverage the historical data. To investigate the problem, this study adopts a user-centered design approach. We first collect user requirements by conducting interviews with tax managers and characterize their requirements of shifting and scheduling into time series prediction and resource scheduling problems. Then, we propose Tax-Scheduler, an interactive visualization system with a time-series prediction algorithm and genetic algorithm to support staff shifting and scheduling in the tax scenarios. To evaluate the effectiveness of the system and understand how non-technical tax managers react to the system with advanced algorithms and visualizations, we conduct user interviews with tax managers and distill several implications for future system design.

Probabilistic programming is a powerful means for formally specifying machine learning models. The inference engine of a probabilistic programming environment can be used for serving complex queries on these models. Most of the current research in probabilistic programming is dedicated to the design and implementation of highly efficient inference engines. Much less research aims at making the power of these inference engines accessible to non-expert users. Probabilistic programming means writing code. Yet many potential users from promising application areas such as the social sciences lack programming skills. This prompted recent efforts in synthesizing probabilistic programs directly from data. However, working with synthesized programs still requires the user to read, understand, and write some code, for instance, when invoking the inference engine for answering queries. Here, we present an interactive visual approach to synthesizing and querying probabilistic programs that does not require the user to read or write code.

The digital twin brain (DTB) computing model from brain-inspired computing research is an emerging artificial intelligence technique, which is realized by a computational modeling approach of hardware and software. It can achieve various cognitive abilities and their synergistic mechanisms in a manner similar to the human brain. Given that the task of the DTB is to simulate the functions of the human brain, comparing the similarities and differences between the two is crucial. However, the visualization study of the DTB is still under-researched. Moreover, the complexity of the datasets (multilevel spatiotemporal granularity and different types of comparison tasks) presents new challenges to the analysis and exploration of visualization. Therefore, in this study, we proposed DTBVis, a visual analytics system that supports comparison tasks for the DTB. DTBVis supports iterative explorations from different levels and at different granularities. Combined with automatic similarity recommendation, and high-dimensional exploration, DTBVis can assist experts in understanding the similarities and differences between the DTB and the human brain, thus helping them adjust their model and enhance its functionality. The highest level of DTBVis shows an overview of the datasets from the brain, which is used for comparison and exploration of the function and structure of the DTB and the human brain. The medium level is used for the comparison and exploration of a designated brain region. The low level can analyze a designated brain voxel. We worked closely with experts of brain science and held regular seminars with them. Feedback from the experts indicates that our approach helps them conduct comparative studies of the DTB and human brain and make modeling adjustments of the DTB through intuitive visual comparisons and interactive explorations.

Purpose:

This paper aims to develop a navigation system based on mixed reality, which can display multimodal medical images in an immersive environment and help surgeons locate the target area and surrounding important tissues precisely.

Methods:

To be displayed properly in mixed reality, medical images are processed in this system. High-quality cerebral vessels and nerve fibers with proper colors are reconstructed and exported to mixed reality environment. Multimodal images and models are registered and fused, extracting their key information. The multiple processed images are fused with the real patient in the same coordinate system to guide the surgery.

Results:

The multimodal image system is designed and validated properly. In phantom experiments, the average error of preoperative registration is 1.003 mm and the standard deviation is 0.096 mm. The average proportion of well-registered areas is 94.9%. In patient experiments, the surgeons who participated in the experiments generally indicated that the system had excellent performance and great application prospect for neurosurgery.

Conclusion:

This article proposes a navigation system of multimodal images for neurosurgery based on mixed reality. Compared with other navigation methods, this system can help surgeons locate the target area and surrounding important tissues more precisely and rapidly.

Exploring flow features and patterns hidden behind the data has received extensive academic attention in flow visualization. In this paper, we introduce an importance-guided surface generation and exploration scheme to explore the features and their connections. The features are expressed as an importance field, which can either be derived from a scalar field or be specified as a flow pattern. Guided by the importance field, we sample a pool of seeding curves along the binormal direction and construct stream surfaces to fit the regions of high- importance values. Our scheme evaluates candidate seeding curves by collecting importance scores from the curve and corresponding streamlines. The candidate seeding curves are refined using the high-score segments to identify the optimal surfaces. Comparative visualization among different kinds of flow features across time steps can be easily derived for flow structure analysis. In order to reduce the visual complexity, we leverage SurfRiver to achieve clearer observation by flattening and aligning the surface. Finally, we apply our surface generation scheme guided by flow patterns and scalar fields to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed tool.

Digital phenotyping is the characterization of human behavior patterns based on data from digital devices such as smartphones in order to gain insights into the users’ state and especially to identify ailments. To support supervised machine learning, digital phenotyping requires gathering data from study participants’ smartphones as they live their lives. Periodically, participants are then asked to provide ground truth labels about their health status. Analyzing such complex data is challenging due to limited contextual information and imperfect health/wellness labels. We propose INteractive PHOne-o-typing VISualization (INPHOVIS), an interactive visual framework for exploratory analysis of smartphone health data to study phone-o-types. Prior visualization work has focused on mobile health data with clear semantics such as steps or heart rate data collected using dedicated health devices and wearables such as smartwatches. However, unlike smartphones which are owned by over 85 percent of the US population, wearable devices are less prevalent thus reducing the number of people from whom such data can be collected. In contrast, the “low-level” sensor data (e.g., accelerometer or GPS data) supported by INPHOVIS can be easily collected using smartphones. Data visualizations are designed to provide the essential contextualization of such data and thus help analysts discover complex relationships between observed sensor values and health-predictive phone-o-types. To guide the design of INPHOVIS, we performed a hierarchical task analysis of phone-o-typing requirements with health domain experts. We then designed and implemented multiple innovative visualizations integral to INPHOVIS including stacked bar charts to show diurnal behavioral patterns, calendar views to visualize day-level data along with bar charts, and correlation views to visualize important wellness predictive data. We demonstrate the usefulness of INPHOVIS with walk-throughs of use cases. We also evaluated INPHOVIS with expert feedback and received encouraging responses.