Visual Analytics combines human cognitive processes and abilities with computational models to solve complex problems by using the strengths of computers and humans. Decision-making processes are commonly very complex and involve investigating various factors and indicators. By integrating Visual Analytics into the decision-making process, the human cognitive load can be reduced, and the accuracy of decisions could be higher. This might be why many visual decision support systems exist, and Visual Analytics approaches provide decision support. However, the literature review reveals that there are either structured decision support methods integrating statistical approaches or Visual Analytics methods that are commonly designed for exploration, comparison, and analysis to support decision-making. By investigating the core ideas related to human limitations and programmed decision-making, we propose in this paper a novel Visual Analytics approach to support structured and exploratory approaches by integrating Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods in Visual Analytics. To reduce the common expert judgment in such methods, our approach trains a neural network through the interaction with the system. Our contributions are threefold: providing a systematic view of decision-making processes, discussing the dual paradigms of visual decision support systems, and proposing a Visual Analytics approach that leverages MCDM and neural networks for improved decision support.

The evolving digitization of Germany's medical care provides new opportunities for computer-supported patient treatment. Particularly, resident medical doctors can be empowered to gather comprehensive information about the disease history, medications, and other important indicators quickly and increase the quality of treatment while maintaining the time for treatment. The central element that enables such computer-assisted support in the treatment is electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs facilitate digital access to vast medical data repositories in digital format that were previously confined to analog forms in medical facilities. However, using EHRs in daily medical treatment is time-consuming due to their unstructured textual format. There is a pressing need for analytical tools that extract the most important information from EHRs, provide that information in a quickly comprehensible way, and synthesize the entire patient history for a reliable medical treatment. In this work, we propose an innovative Visual Analytics approach and system specifically designed for medical care. Our approach and the implemented system seamlessly integrate interactive visualizations with fitting pre-trained transformer models to assist medical professionals in consolidating and presenting intricate patient data through comprehensible interactive visual interfaces. Utilizing transformer-based information extraction, it carefully manages the shift from digitized medical documents to quickly accessible patient information in a dynamic and interactive visual interface.

The huge amount of scientific content increases the workload for evaluating state-of-the-art research and the complexity of creating novel and innovative methods and approaches. Although many approaches exist using recommendations in various application domains, the full potential of recommendation systems is not yet fully utilized. Particularly, there are missing approaches that combine interactive visualizations with recommendation systems to enable an analytical investigation of the current state of technology and science. We, therefore, propose in this work a novel Visual Analytics approach that integrates recommendation methods as the model and provides a seamless integration of both interactive visualizations and recommendation systems. We utilize MAE and RMSE metrics and human validation to identify the best approach out of eight approaches that differ in vectorization and similarity algorithms to recommend scientific items. We contribute novel approaches for recommending scientific publications, venues, and projects, based on comparing traditional and deep-learning-based recommendation approaches. Furthermore, we propose a Visual Analytics approach that uses recommendation methods for analytical elaboration. This work shows the potential of integrating recommendation systems into scientific research and identifies potential future directions for improving the proposed model.

Knowledge of emerging and declining trends and their potential future course is highly relevant in many application domains, particularly in corporate strategy and foresight. The early awareness of trends allows reacting to market, political, and societal changes and challenges at an appropriate time. In our previous works, we presented approaches for the early identification and analysis of emerging trends. Although our previous approaches are detecting emerging trends appropriately, they lack the ability to predict the potential future course of a trend or technology. We present in this work a novel Visual Analytics approach for forecasting emerging trends that combines interactive visualizations with machine learning techniques and statistical approaches to detect, analyze, and predict trends from textual data. We extend our previous work on analyzing technological trends from text and propose an advanced approach that includes forecasting through hybrid techniques consisting of neural networks and established statistical methods. Our approach offers insights from enormous data sets and the potential future course of trends based on their occurrence in textual data. We contribute with a novel approach for identifying and forecasting trends, a hybrid forecasting method to predict trends from text, and interactive visualization techniques on macro level, micro level, and monitoring topics of interest.

Corporate Foresight is a strategic planning process that helps organizations anticipate and prepare for future trends and developments that may impact their operations. It involves analyzing data, identifying potential scenarios, and creating strategies to address them to ensure long-term success and sustainability. Visual Analytics approaches have been introduced to cover parts of the Corporate Foresight process. These concepts present different approaches to integrate machine learning methods and artificial intelligence with interactive visualizations to solve tasks such as identifying emerging trends. A holistic concept for synthesizing Visual Analytics with Corporate Foresight does not exist yet. We propose in this work a holistic Visual Analytics approach that covers the main aspects of Corporate Foresight by including strategic management and considers different organizational forms. Our model goes beyond the state-of-the-art by providing, besides foresight also, hindsight and insight. Our main contributions are the revised Visual Analytics model and its proof of concept through implementation as a web-based system with real data.

Studies have shown that collaboration in scientific fields is rising and considered enormously important. However, collaboration has proved to be challenging for various reasons, among others, the requirements for human-machine workflows. The importance of scientific collaboration lies in the complexity of the challenges that are faced today. The more complex the challenge, the more scientists should work together. The current form of collaboration in the scientific community is not as intelligent as it should be. Scientists have to multitask with various applications, often losing cognitive focus. Collaboration itself is very nearsighted as it is usually conducted not solely based on expertise but instead on social or local networks. We introduce a single-source visual collaboration approach based on learning methods in this work. We use machine learning and natural language processing approaches to improve the traditional research and development process and create a system that facilitates and encourages collaboration based on expertise, enhancing the research collaboration process in many ways. Our approach combines collaborative Visual Analytics with enhanced collaboration techniques to support researchers from different disciplines.

Systematic reviews play an essential role in various disciplines. Particularly, in biomedical sciences, systematic reviews according to a predefined schema and protocol are how related literature is analyzed. Although a protocol-based systematic review is replicable and provides the required information to reproduce each step and refine them, such a systematic review is time-consuming and may get complex. To face this challenge, automatic methods can be applied that support researchers in their systematic analysis process. The combination of artificial intelligence for automatic information extraction from scientific literature with interactive visualizations as a Visual Analytics system can lead to sophisticated analysis and protocoling of the review process. We introduce in this paper a novel Visual Analytics approach and system that enables researchers to visually search and explore scientific publications and generate a protocol based on the PRISMA protocol and the PRISMA statement.

Visual Analytics enables solving complex analytical tasks by coupling interactive visualizations and machine learning approaches. Besides the analytical reasoning enabled through Visual Analytics, the exploration of data plays an essential role. The exploration process can be supported through similarity-based approaches that enable finding similar data to those annotated in the context of visual exploration. We propose in this paper a process of annotation in the context of exploration that leads to labeled vectors-of-interest and enables finding similar publications based on interest vectors. The generation and labeling of the interest vectors are performed automatically by the Visual Analytics system and lead to finding similar papers and categorizing the annotated papers. With this approach, we provide a categorized similarity search based on an automatically labeled interest matrix in Visual Analytics.