Immersive scientific data exploration faces challenges in precise and efficient interaction. Tangible media offer a potential solution; but designers lack clear guidance on choosing the appropriate physical dimensionality (1D, 2D, or 3D) for different tasks. To address this problem, we present a design space structuring the relationship between the representative techniques on scientific data visualization and exploration, tangible interactions, and media dimensionality. We further developed a prototype to empirically explore these relationships according to our design space. In a controlled user study, we compared 1D, 2D, and 3D tangible media across seven core techniques. The results demonstrated that the 3D media (e.g., a box) were preferred when tasks required manipulating the entire volumetric data and acted as a proxy. Regarding the tasks requiring 2D operations or interior localization, the 2D media (e.g., a card) offered superior performance. For single-parameter techniques like histogram-based filtering, the 1D media (e.g., a pen) were overwhelmingly preferred for their simplicity and perceived ease of use.

The High School Entrance Examination is a critical transitional point in basic education, serving as both a key measure of students’ academic levels and a pivotal determinant of their access to senior high school resources and future pathways. Analyzing the link between mock exam scores and senior high school preference choices is essential for scientifically guiding school entrance planning and refining preparation strategies. This study uses a genetic algorithm to optimize random forest parameters and presents AdmPredVis, a visualization system with multi-view collaboration for admission prediction. The system includes three core views: Prediction results view visualizes educational progression, score distributions, and ZY rankings via junior-senior high school tables; Model explanation view visualizes random forest decision processes and individual attribution; Student list supports detailed instance information display, data editing, and real-time prediction feedback to provide guidance for students. Case analyses and expert evaluations validate the model’s effectiveness and AdmPredVis’s practical value in educational planning.

Abstract Danmu (Danmaku) is a unique social media service in online videos, especially popular in Japan and China, for viewers to write comments while watching videos. The danmu comments are overlaid on the video screen and synchronized to the associated video time, indicating viewers' thoughts of the video clip. This paper introduces an interactive visualization system to analyze danmu comments and associated viewer behaviors in a collection of videos and enable detailed exploration of one video on demand. The watching behaviors of viewers are identified by comparing video time and post time of viewers' danmu. The system supports analyzing danmu content and viewers' behaviors against both video time and post time to gain insights into viewers' online participation and perceived experience. Our evaluations, including usage scenarios and user interviews, demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our system.

We propose R-Map (Reposting Map), a visual analytical approach with a map metaphor to support interactive exploration and analysis of the information reposting process in social media. A single original social media post can cause large cascades of repostings (i.e., retweets) on online networks, involving thousands, even millions of people with different opinions. Such reposting behaviors form the reposting tree, in which a node represents a message and a link represents the reposting relation. In R-Map, the reposting tree structure can be spatialized with highlighted key players and tiled nodes. The important reposting behaviors, the following relations and the semantics relations are represented as rivers, routes and bridges, respectively, in a virtual geographical space. R-Map supports a scalable overview of a large number of information repostings with semantics. Additional interactions on the map are provided to support the investigation of temporal patterns and user behaviors in the information diffusion process. We evaluate the usability and effectiveness of our system with two use cases and a formal user study.

Information diffusion analysis is important in social media. In this work, we present a coherent ego-centric and event-centric model to investigate diffusion patterns and user behaviors. Applying the model, we propose Diffusion Map+ (D-Maps+), a novel visualization method to support exploration and analysis of user behaviors and diffusion patterns through a map metaphor. For ego-centric analysis, users who participated in reposting (i.e., resending a message initially posted by others) one central user’s posts (i.e., a series of original tweets) are collected. Event-centric analysis focuses on multiple central users discussing a specific event, with all the people participating and reposting messages about it. Social media users are mapped to a hexagonal grid based on their behavior similarities and in the chronological order of repostings. With the additional interactions and linkings, D-Map+ is capable of providing visual profiling of influential users, describing their social behaviors and analyzing the evolution of significant events in social media. A comprehensive visual analysis system is developed to support interactive exploration with D-Map+. We evaluate our work with real-world social media data and find interesting patterns among users and events. We also perform evaluations including user studies and expert feedback to certify the capabilities of our method.

User behavior analysis is complex and especially crucial in the cyber security domain. Understanding dynamic and multi-variate user behavior are challenging. Traditional sequential and timeline based method cannot easily address the complexity of temporal and relational features of user behaviors. We propose a map-based visual metaphor and create an interactive map for encoding user behaviors. It enables analysts to explore and identify user behavior patterns and helps them to understand why some behaviors are regarded as anomalous. We experiment with a real dataset containing multiple user sessions, consisting of sequences of diverse types of actions. In the behavior map, we encode an action as a city and user sessions as trajectories going through the cities. The position of the cities is determined by the sequential and temporal relationship of actions. Spatial and temporal patterns on the map reflect behavior patterns in the action space. In the case study, we illustrate how we explore relationships between actions, identify patterns of the typical session and detect anomaly behaviors.