Visualizing and segmenting large volumetric data sets

Current systems for segmenting and visualizing volumetric data sets characteristically require the user to possess a technical sophistication in volume visualization techniques, thus restricting the potential audience of users. As large volumetric data sets become more common, segmentation and visualization tools need to deemphasize the technical aspects of visualization and let users exploit their content knowledge of the data set. This proves especially critical in an educational setting. In anatomical education, data sets such as the Visible Human Project provide significant learning opportunities, but students must have tools that let them apply, refine, and build on their anatomical knowledge without technical obstacles. I describe a software environment that uses immersive virtual reality technology to let users immediately apply their expert knowledge to exploring and visualizing volumetric data sets     

Value and relation display: interactive visual exploration of large data sets with hundreds of dimensions

Few existing visualization systems can handle large data sets with hundreds of dimensions, since high-dimensional data sets cause clutter on the display and large response time in interactive exploration. In this paper, we present a significantly improved multidimensional visualization approach named Value and Relation (VaR) display that allows users to effectively and efficiently explore large data sets with several hundred dimensions. In the VaR display, data values and dimension relationships are explicitly visualized in the same display by using dimension glyphs to explicitly represent values in dimensions and glyph layout to explicitly convey dimension relationships. In particular, pixel-oriented techniques and density-based scatterplots are used to create dimension glyphs to convey values. Multidimensional scaling, Jigsaw map hierarchy visualization techniques, and an animation metaphor named Rainfall are used to convey relationships among dimensions. A rich set of interaction tools has been provided to allow users to interactively detect patterns of interest in the VaR display. A prototype of the VaR display has been fully implemented. The case studies presented in this paper show how the prototype supports interactive exploration of data sets of several hundred dimensions. A user study evaluating the prototype is also reported in this paper     

GuideME: Slice‐guided Semiautomatic Multivariate Exploration of Volumes

Multivariate volume visualization is important for many applications including petroleum exploration and medicine. State‐of‐the‐art tools allow users to interactively explore volumes with multiple linked parameter‐space views. However, interactions in the parameter space using trial‐and‐error may be unintuitive and time consuming. Furthermore, switching between different views may be distracting. In this paper, we propose GuideME: a novel slice‐guided semiautomatic multivariate volume exploration approach. Specifically, the approach comprises four stages: attribute inspection, guided uncertainty‐aware lasso creation, automated feature extraction and optional spatial fine tuning and visualization. Throughout the exploration process, the user does not need to interact with the parameter views at all and examples of complex real‐world data demonstrate the usefulness, efficiency and ease‐of‐use of our method.     

Leveraging link pattern for entity-centric exploration over Linked Data

The increasing amount of Linked Data on the Web can be reused to facilitate numerous applications. One of the first steps is to explore these structured data to determine whether there is relevant information. Since an entity-centric model closely reflects the real world, it provides an intuitive way to explore Linked Data. However, large numbers of linked entities and high diversity of links between entities, often make it difficult for users to understand the overall structure, as well as find the entities of interest quickly for further exploration. In this paper, we present a link pattern discovery approach to facilitate entity exploration. Link patterns describe explicit and implicit relationships between entities and can be used to categorize linked entities. On top of link patterns, we construct a hierarchy to allow exploration of linked entities in a hierarchical multiscale fashion. To lighten users’ exploration burden further, we select top-k link patterns from hierarchy as navigation options. The proposed approach is implemented in a Linked Data browser called SView. We compare it with two conventional Linked Data browsers by conducting a task-based user study. The experiment results show that our approach provides effective support for entity exploration.     

Orchard: Exploring Multivariate Heterogeneous Networks on Mobile Phones

People are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to navigate information spaces using search, hyperlinks, and visualization. But, mobile phones preclude the use of multiple coordinated views that have proven effective in the desktop environment (e.g., for business intelligence or visual analytics). In this work, we propose to model information as multivariate heterogeneous networks to enable greater analytic expression for a range of sensemaking tasks while suggesting a new, list-based paradigm with gestural navigation of structured information spaces on mobile phones. We also present a mobile application, called Orchard, which combines ideas from both faceted search and interactive network exploration in a visual query language to allow users to collect facets of interest during exploratory navigation. Our study showed that users could collect and combine these facets with Orchard, specifying network queries and projections that would only have been possible previously using complex data tools or custom data science.     

Dealing with incomplete information in a fuzzy linguistic recommender system to disseminate information in university digital libraries

As in the Web, the growing of information is the main problem of the academic digital libraries. Thus, similar tools could be applied in university digital libraries to facilitate the information access by the students and teachers. In [46] we presented a fuzzy linguistic recommender system to advice research resources in university digital libraries. The problem of this system is that the user profiles are provided directly by the own users and the process for acquiring user preferences is quite difficult because it requires too much user effort. In this paper we present a new fuzzy linguistic recommender system that facilitates the acquisition of the user preferences to characterize the user profiles. We allow users to provide their preferences by means of incomplete fuzzy linguistic preference relation. We include tools to manage incomplete information when the users express their preferences, and, in such a way, we show that the acquisition of the user profiles is improved.     

Semiotic analysis of multi-touch interface design: The MuTable case study

Although multi-touch applications and user interfaces have become increasingly common in the last few years, there is no agreed-upon multi-touch user interface language yet. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the design of multi-touch user interfaces, this paper presents semiotic analysis of multi-touch applications as an interesting approach to gain deeper understanding of the way users use and understand multi-touch interfaces. In a case study example, user tests of a multi-touch tabletop application platform called MuTable are analysed with the Communicability Evaluation Method to evaluate to what extent users understand the intended messages (e.g., cues about interaction and functionality) the MuTable platform communicates. The semiotic analysis of this case study shows that although multi-touch interfaces can facilitate user exploration, the lack of well-known standards in multi-touch interface design and in the use of gestures makes the user interface difficult to use and interpret. This conclusion points to the importance of the elusive balance between letting users explore multi-touch systems on their own on one hand, and guiding users, explaining how to use and interpret the user interface, on the other.     

基于改进Canopy聚类的协同过滤推荐算法

推荐系统通过建立用户和信息产品之间的二元关系,利用用户行为产生的数据挖掘每个用户感兴趣的对象并进行推荐,基于用户的协同过滤是近年来的主流办法,但存在一定局限性：推荐时需要考虑全部用户,而单个用户往往只与少部分用户类似。为了解决这个问题,提出了基于改进Canopy聚类的协同过滤推荐算法,将用户模型数据密度、距离与用户活跃度结合,计算用户数据权值,对用户模型数据进行聚类。由于结合了Canopy的聚类思想,同一用户可以属于不同的类,符合用户可能对多领域感兴趣的情况。最后对每个Canopy中的用户进行相应的推荐,根据聚类结果与用户评分预测用户可能感兴趣的对象。通过在数据集MovieLens和million songs上与对比算法进行MAE、RMSE、NDGG三个指标的比较,验证了该算法能显著提高推荐系统预测与推荐的准确度。     

Supporting serendipitous integration in mobile computing environments

In the richly networked world of the near future, mobile computing users will be confronted with an ever-expanding array of devices and services accessible in their environments. In such a world, we cannot expect to have available to us specific applications that allow us to accomplish every conceivable combination of devices that we may wish. Instead, we believe that many of our interactions with the network will be characterized by the use of “general purpose” tools that allow us to discover, use, and integrate multiple devices around us. This paper lays out the case for why we believe that so-called “serendipitous integration” is a necessary fact that we will face in mobile computing, and explores a number of design experiments into supporting end user configuration and control of networked environments through general purpose tools. We present an iterative design approach to creating such tools and their user interfaces, discuss our observations about the challenges of designing for such a world, and then explore a number of tools that take differing design approaches to overcoming these challenges. We conclude with a set of reflections on the user experience issues that we believe are inherent in dealing with ad hoc mobile computing in richly networked environments.     

Knowledge discovery in high-dimensional data: case studies and a user survey for the rank-by-feature framework

Knowledge discovery in high-dimensional data is a challenging enterprise, but new visual analytic tools appear to offer users remarkable powers if they are ready to learn new concepts and interfaces. Our three-year effort to develop versions of the hierarchical clustering explorer (HCE) began with building an interactive tool for exploring clustering results. It expanded, based on user needs, to include other potent analytic and visualization tools for multivariate data, especially the rank-by-feature framework. Our own successes using HCE provided some testimonial evidence of its utility, but we felt it necessary to get beyond our subjective impressions. This paper presents an evaluation of the hierarchical clustering explorer (HCE) using three case studies and an e-mail user survey (n=57) to focus on skill acquisition with the novel concepts and interface for the rank-by-feature framework. Knowledgeable and motivated users in diverse fields provided multiple perspectives that refined our understanding of strengths and weaknesses. A user survey confirmed the benefits of HCE, but gave less guidance about improvements. Both evaluations suggested improved training methods.     

Enhancing cultural recommendations through social and linked open data

In this article, we describe a hybrid recommender system (RS) in the artistic and cultural heritage area, which takes into account the activities on social media performed by the target user and her friends, and takes advantage of linked open data (LOD) sources. Concretely, the proposed RS (1) extracts information from Facebook by analyzing content generated by users and their friends; (2) performs disambiguation tasks through LOD tools; (3) profiles the active user as a social graph; (4) provides her with personalized suggestions of artistic and cultural resources in the surroundings of the user’s current location. The last point is performed by integrating collaborative filtering algorithms with semantic technologies in order to leverage LOD sources such as DBpedia and Europeana. Based on the recommended points of cultural interest, the proposed system is also able to suggest to the active user itineraries among them, which meet her preferences and needs and are sensitive to her physical and social contexts as well. Experimental results on real users showed the effectiveness of the different modules of the proposed recommender.

     

Visual Recommendations for Network Navigation

Understanding large, complex networks is important for many critical tasks, including decision making, process optimization, and threat detection. Existing network analysis tools often lack intuitive interfaces to support the exploration of large scale data. We present a visual recommendation system to help guide users during navigation of network data. Collaborative filtering, similarity metrics, and relative importance are used to generate recommendations of potentially significant nodes for users to explore. In addition, graph layout and node visibility are adjusted in real‐time to accommodate recommendation display and to reduce visual clutter. Case studies are presented to show how our design can improve network exploration.     

GrouseFlocks: steerable exploration of graph hierarchy space

Several previous systems allow users to interactively explore a large input graph through cuts of a superimposed hierarchy. This hierarchy is often created using clustering algorithms or topological features present in the graph. However, many graphs have domain-specific attributes associated with the nodes and edges which could be used to create many possible hierarchies providing unique views of the input graph. GrouseFlocks is a system for the exploration of this graph hierarchy space. By allowing users to see several different possible hierarchies on the same graph, it allows users to investigate hierarchy space instead of a single, fixed hierarchy. GrouseFlocks provides a simple set of operations so that users can create and modify their graph hierarchies based on selections. These selections can be made manually or based on patterns in the attribute data provided with the graph. It provides feedback to the user within seconds, allowing interactive exploration of this space.     

Visualizing visualizations. User interfaces for managing andexploring scientific visualization data

The process of scientific visualization is inherently iterative. A good visualization comes from experimenting with visualization, rendering, and viewing parameters to bring out the most relevant information in the data. A good data visualization system thus lets scientists interactively explore the parameter space intuitively. The more efficient the system, the fewer the number of iterations needed for parameter selection. Over the past 10 years, significant efforts have gone into advancing visualization technology (such as real-time volume rendering and immersive environments), but little into coherently representing the process and results (images and insights) of visualization. This information about the data exploration should be shared and reused. In particular, for types of data visualization with a high cost of producing images and less than obvious relationship between the rendering parameters and the image produced, a visual representation of the exploration process can make the process more efficient and effective. This visual representation of data exploration process and results can be incorporated into and become a part of the user interface of a data exploration system. That is, we need to go beyond the traditional graphical user interface (GUI) design by coupling it with a mechanism that helps users keep track of their visualization experience, use it to generate new visualizations, and share it with others. Doing so can reduce the cost of visualization, particularly for routine analysis of large-scale data sets     

An effective collaborative filtering algorithm based on user preference clustering

Collaborative filtering is one of widely used recommendation approaches to make recommendation services for users. The core of this approach is to improve capability for finding accurate and reliable neighbors of active users. However, collected data is extremely sparse in the user-item rating matrix, meanwhile many existing similarity measure methods using in collaborative filtering are not much effective, which result in the poor performance. In this paper, a novel effective collaborative filtering algorithm based on user preference clustering is proposed to reduce the impact of the data sparsity. First, user groups are introduced to distinguish users with different preferences. Then, considering the preference of the active user, we obtain the nearest neighbor set from corresponding user group/user groups. Besides, a new similarity measure method is proposed to preferably calculate the similarity between users, which considers user preference in the local and global perspectives, respectively. Finally, experimental results on two benchmark data sets show that the proposed algorithm is effective to improve the performance of recommender systems.     

融合正态分布函数相似度的协同过滤算法

传统协同过滤推荐算法的相似度量方法仅考虑用户间共同评分,忽略了用户间潜在共同评分项等信息量对推荐结果的影响。针对上述问题,设计了一种正态分布函数相似度量模型,此模型考虑了用户间的共同评分、共同评分项目数、以及用户的评分值,据此提出了融合正态分布函数相似度的协同过滤算法,该算法通过综合多种评分因素利用正态分布函数和修正的余弦相似度共同度量用户间的相似关系。实验结果表明,在两种数据集上与几种不同的推荐算法相比,该算法的相似度量方法提高了目标用户查找邻近用户集合的准确率,提高了系统的推荐质量。     

Comparing Parameter Manipulation with Mouse, Pen, and Slider User Interfaces

Visual fixation on one's tool(s) takes much attention away from one's primary task. Following the belief that the best tools 'disappear' and become invisible to the user, we present a study comparing visual fixations (eye gaze within locations on a graphical display) and performance for mouse, pen, and physical slider user interfaces. Participants conducted a controlled, yet representative, color matching task that required user interaction representative of many data exploration tasks such as parameter exploration of medical or fuel cell data. We demonstrate that users may spend up to 95% fewer visual fixations on physical sliders versus standard mouse and pen tools without any loss in performance for a generalized visual performance task.     

融合用户动态标签和信任关系的协同过滤算法

针对协同过滤推荐算法中的冷启动以及数据稀疏问题,提出一种融合用户动态标签和用户信任关系的矩阵概率分解模型。该模型首先通过构建用户集、标签集和物品集三者间的动态联系,建立用户动态偏好矩阵;接着构建基于用户社会网络信息的用户信任关系矩阵,该信任关系矩阵使用用户信任反馈机制以实时更新用户间的信任值;最后提出融合用户动态标签和用户信任关系的矩阵概率分解模型,并在MovieLens与Jester_Joke_data数据集上进行仿真实验。实验结果表明,该算法在绝对误差均值、准确率与召回率方面获得了较好的效果,在一定程度上能有效提高了协同过滤推荐算法的性能。     

一种面向多维特征分析过滤的视频推荐算法

近年来,抖音、快手、微视等短视频APP取得了巨大成功,用户拍摄并上传到APP平台上的视频数量暴增。在这种信息过载的环境下,为用户挖掘并推荐其感兴趣的视频成为了视频发布平台面临的难题,因此为这些平台设计高效的视频推荐算法显得尤其重要。文中针对媒体大数据挖掘和推荐领域的数据集稀疏性高和规模巨大的问题,提出一种面向多维特征分析过滤的视频推荐算法。首先,从用户行为和视频标签等多个维度对视频进行特征提取,然后进行相似性分析,加权计算视频相似度,从而获取相似视频候选集,并对相似视频候选集进行过滤,再通过排序选择评分最高的若干个视频推荐给用户。最后,基于MovieLens公开数据集,使用python3语言实现了文中提出的视频推荐算法。在数据集上进行的大量实验表明,相比传统的协同过滤算法,文中提出的面向多维特征分析过滤的视频推荐算法将推荐结果的准确率提升了6%,召回率提升了4%,覆盖率提升了18%。实验数据充分说明,从多个维度考虑视频之间的相似性,并配合大规模矩阵分解技术,在一定程度上缓解了数据集稀疏性高、数据量巨大的难题,从而有效地提高了推荐结果的准确性、召回率和覆盖率。