Thalmann Stefan, Gursch Heimo, Suschnigg Josef, Gashi Milot, Ennsbrunner Helmut, Fuchs Anna Katharina, Schreck Tobias, Mutlu Belgin, Mangler Jürgen, Huemer Christian, Lindstaedt Stefanie
2019
Current trends in manufacturing lead to more intelligent products, produced in global supply chains in shorter cycles, taking more and complex requirements into account. To manage this increasing complexity, cognitive decision support systems, building on data analytic approaches and focusing on the product life cycle, stages seem a promising approach. With two high-tech companies (world market leader in their domains) from Austria, we are approaching this challenge and jointly develop cognitive decision support systems for three real world industrial use cases. Within this position paper, we introduce our understanding of cognitive decision support and we introduce three industrial use cases, focusing on the requirements for cognitive decision support. Finally, we describe our preliminary solution approach for each use case and our next steps.
Mutlu Belgin, Simic Ilija, Cicchinelli Analia, Sabol Vedran, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2018
Learning dashboards (LD) are commonly applied for monitoring and visual analysis of learning activities. The main purpose of LDs is to increase awareness, to support self assessment and reflection and, when used in collaborative learning platforms (CLP), to improve the collaboration among learners. Collaborative learning platforms serve astools to bring learners together, who share the same interests and ideas and are willing to work and learn together – a process which, ideally, leads to effective knowledge building. However, there are collaborationand communications factors which affect the effectiveness of knowledge creation – human, social and motivational factors, design issues, technical conditions, and others. In this paper we introduce a learning dashboard – the Visualizer – that serves the purpose of (statistically) analyzing andexploring the behaviour of communities and users. Visualizer allows a learner to become aware of other learners with similar characteristics and also to draw comparisons with individuals having similar learninggoals. It also helps a teacher become aware of how individuals working in the groups (learning communities) interact with one another and across groups.
Mutlu Belgin, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Trattner Christoph
2017
In today's digital age with an increasing number of websites, social/learning platforms, and different computer-mediated communication systems, finding valuable information is a challenging and tedious task, regardless from which discipline a person is. However, visualizations have shown to be effective in dealing with huge datasets: because they are grounded on visual cognition, people understand them and can naturally perform visual operations such as clustering, filtering and comparing quantities. But, creating appropriate visual representations of data is also challenging: it requires domain knowledge, understanding of the data, and knowledge about task and user preferences. To tackle this issue, we have developed a recommender system that generates visualizations based on (i) a set of visual cognition rules/guidelines, and (ii) filters a subset considering user preferences. A user places interests on several aspects of a visualization, the task or problem it helps to solve, the operations it permits, or the features of the dataset it represents. This paper concentrates on characterizing user preferences, in particular: i) the sources of information used to describe the visualizations, the content descriptors respectively, and ii) the methods to produce the most suitable recommendations thereby. We consider three sources corresponding to different aspects of interest: a title that describes the chart, a question that can be answered with the chart (and the answer), and a collection of tags describing features of the chart. We investigate user-provided input based on these sources collected with a crowd-sourced study. Firstly, information-theoretic measures are applied to each source to determine the efficiency of the input in describing user preferences and visualization contents (user and item models). Secondly, the practicability of each input is evaluated with content-based recommender system. The overall methodology and results contribute methods for design and analysis of visual recommender systems. The findings in this paper highlight the inputs which can (i) effectively encode the content of the visualizations and user's visual preferences/interest, and (ii) are more valuable for recommending personalized visualizations.
Mutlu Belgin, Sabol Vedran, Gursch Heimo, Kern Roman
2016
Graphical interfaces and interactive visualisations are typical mediators between human users and data analytics systems. HCI researchers and developers have to be able to understand both human needs and back-end data analytics. Participants of our tutorial will learn how visualisation and interface design can be combined with data analytics to provide better visualisations. In the first of three parts, the participants will learn about visualisations and how to appropriately select them. In the second part, restrictions and opportunities associated with different data analytics systems will be discussed. In the final part, the participants will have the opportunity to develop visualisations and interface designs under given scenarios of data and system settings.
Luzhnica Granit, Pammer-Schindler Viktoria, Fessl Angela, Mutlu Belgin, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2016
Especially in lifelong or professional learning, the picture of a continuous learning analytics process emerges. In this proces s, het- erogeneous and changing data source applications provide data relevant to learning, at the same time as questions of learners to data cha nge. This reality challenges designers of analytics tools, as it req uires ana- lytics tools to deal with data and analytics tasks that are unk nown at application design time. In this paper, we describe a generic vi sualiza- tion tool that addresses these challenges by enabling the vis ualization of any activity log data. Furthermore, we evaluate how well parti cipants can answer questions about underlying data given such generic versus custom visualizations. Study participants performed better in 5 out of 10 tasks with the generic visualization tool, worse in 1 out of 1 0 tasks, and without significant difference when compared to the visuali zations within the data-source applications in the remaining 4 of 10 ta sks. The experiment clearly showcases that overall, generic, standalon e visualiza- tion tools have the potential to support analytical tasks suffi ciently well
Tschinkel Gerwald, di Sciascio Maria Cecilia, Mutlu Belgin, Sabol Vedran
2015
Recommender systems are becoming common tools supportingautomatic, context-based retrieval of resources.When the number of retrieved resources grows large visualtools are required that leverage the capacity of humanvision to analyse large amounts of information. Weintroduce a Web-based visual tool for exploring and organisingrecommendations retrieved from multiple sourcesalong dimensions relevant to cultural heritage and educationalcontext. Our tool provides several views supportingfiltering in the result set and integrates a bookmarkingsystem for organising relevant resources into topic collections.Building upon these features we envision a systemwhich derives user’s interests from performed actions anduses this information to support the recommendation process.We also report on results of the performed usabilityevaluation and derive directions for further development.
Mutlu Belgin, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Trattner Christoph, Sabol Vedran
2015
isualizations have a distinctive advantage when dealing with the information overload problem: being grounded in basic visual cognition, many people understand visualizations. However, when it comes to creating them, it requires specific expertise of the domain and underlying data to determine the right representation. Although there are rules that help generate them, the results are too broad as these methods hardly account for varying user preferences. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel recommender system that suggests visualizations based on (i) a set of visual cognition rules and (ii) user preferences collected in Amazon-Mechanical Turk. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction and the evaluation of a novel approach called VizRec that is able suggest an optimal list of top-n visualizations for heterogeneous data sources in a personalized manner.
Mutlu Belgin, Sabol Vedran
2015
The steadily increasing amount of scientific publications demands for more powerful, user-oriented technologiessupporting querying and analyzing scientific facts therein. Current digital libraries that provide services to accessscientific content are rather closed in a way that they deploy their own meta-models and technologies to query and analysethe knowledge contained in scientific publications. The goal of the research project CODE is to realize a framework basedon Linked Data principles which aims to provide methods for federated querying within scientific data, and interfacesenabling user to easily perform exploration and analysis tasks on received content. The main focus in this paper lieson the one hand on extraction and organization of scientific facts embedded in publications and on the other hand on anintelligent framework facilitating search and visual analysis of scientific facts through suggesting visualizations appropriatefor the underlying data.
Mutlu Belgin, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Trattner Christoph, Sabol Vedran
2015
Identifying and using the information from distributed and heterogeneous information sources is a challenging task in many application fields. Even with services that offer welldefined structured content, such as digital libraries, it becomes increasingly difficult for a user to find the desired information. To cope with an overloaded information space, we propose a novel approach – VizRec– combining recommender systems (RS) and visualizations. VizRec suggests personalized visual representations for recommended data. One important aspect of our contribution and a prerequisite for VizRec are user preferences that build a personalization model. We present a crowd based evaluation and show how such a model of preferences can be elicited.
Veas Eduardo Enrique, Mutlu Belgin, di Sciascio Maria Cecilia, Tschinkel Gerwald, Sabol Vedran
2015
Supporting individuals who lack experience or competence to evaluate an overwhelming amout of informationsuch as from cultural, scientific and educational content makes recommender system invaluable to cope withthe information overload problem. However, even recommended information scales up and users still needto consider large number of items. Visualization takes a foreground role, letting the user explore possiblyinteresting results. It leverages the high bandwidth of the human visual system to convey massive amounts ofinformation. This paper argues the need to automate the creation of visualizations for unstructured data adaptingit to the user’s preferences. We describe a prototype solution, taking a radical approach considering bothgrounded visual perception guidelines and personalized recommendations to suggest the proper visualization.
Tschinkel Gerwald, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Mutlu Belgin, Sabol Vedran
2014
Providing easy to use methods for visual analysis of LinkedData is often hindered by the complexity of semantic technologies. Onthe other hand, semantic information inherent to Linked Data providesopportunities to support the user in interactively analysing the data. Thispaper provides a demonstration of an interactive, Web-based visualisa-tion tool, the “Vis Wizard”, which makes use of semantics to simplify theprocess of setting up visualisations, transforming the data and, most im-portantly, interactively analysing multiple datasets using brushing andlinking method
Sabol Vedran, Albert Dietrich, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Mutlu Belgin, Granitzer Michael
2014
Linked Data has grown to become one of the largest availableknowledge bases. Unfortunately, this wealth of data remains inaccessi-ble to those without in-depth knowledge of semantic technologies. Wedescribe a toolchain enabling users without semantic technology back-ground to explore and visually analyse Linked Data. We demonstrateits applicability in scenarios involving data from the Linked Open DataCloud, and research data extracted from scientific publications. Our fo-cus is on the Web-based front-end consisting of querying and visuali-sation tools. The performed usability evaluations unveil mainly positiveresults confirming that the Query Wizard simplifies searching, refiningand transforming Linked Data and, in particular, that people using theVisualisation Wizard quickly learn to perform interactive analysis taskson the resulting Linked Data sets. In making Linked Data analysis ef-fectively accessible to the general public, our tool has been integratedin a number of live services where people use it to analyse, discover anddiscuss facts with Linked Data.
Mutlu Belgin, Tschinkel Gerwald, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Sabol Vedran, Stegmaier Florian, Granitzer Michael
2014
Research papers are published in various digital libraries, which deploy their own meta-models and tech-nologies to manage, query, and analyze scientific facts therein. Commonly they only consider the meta-dataprovided with each article, but not the contents. Hence, reaching into the contents of publications is inherentlya tedious task. On top of that, scientific data within publications are hardcoded in a fixed format (e.g. tables).So, even if one manages to get a glimpse of the data published in digital libraries, it is close to impossibleto carry out any analysis on them other than what was intended by the authors. More effective querying andanalysis methods are required to better understand scientific facts. In this paper, we present the web-basedCODE Visualisation Wizard, which provides visual analysis of scientific facts with emphasis on automatingthe visualisation process, and present an experiment of its application. We also present the entire analyticalprocess and the corresponding tool chain, including components for extraction of scientific data from publica-tions, an easy to use user interface for querying RDF knowledge bases, and a tool for semantic annotation ofscientific data set