Urban visual querying leverages visual representations and interactions to depict the domain of interest and express related requests for exploring complex datasets, which is usually an iterative process. One main challenge of this process is the vast search space in terms of identifying querying conditions, observing querying results, and making the subsequent queries. This paper proposes a novel acceleration scheme that intelligently recommends a small set of querying results subject to previous queries. Central to our approach is a reinforcement learning based approach that trains a recommendation agent by simulating user behavior and characterizing the search space. We propose a mixed-initiative urban visual query scheme to enhance the exploration process additionally. We evaluate our approach by performing qualitative and quantitative experiments on a real-world scenario. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of reducing user workload, achieving optimized querying, and improving analysis efficiency.

The security of individual privacy is paramount for trajectory publication, while preserving trajectory utility is also essential to serve analysis tasks such as urban planning and transportation development. To assess and maintain trajectory utility, existing studies consider geographic context. However, innate semantic characteristics of trajectories (e.g., origin, destination, stay point, path) have been overlooked, which prevents data owners from specifying task-specific utility measurements and, consequently, from achieving a delicate balance between privacy and utility. This paper proposes an interactive trajectory publishing approach driven by flexible utility considerations, which processes trajectory points according to their semantics to fulfill diverse utility requirements. Concretely, we decouple trajectories into origin-destination (OD) and path components: ODs are generalized into regions to satisfy $k$k-anonymity, and paths are sanitized within each OD group using road-network-aware differential privacy under predefined privacy constraints. We also develop a visual interface to support exploration and comprehension of privacy-preserving solutions, through which we incorporate human knowledge into the privacy scheme. Experiments on real-world urban datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Graph visualization techniques provide a foundational framework for offering comprehensive overviews and insights into cloud computing systems, facilitating efficient management and ensuring their availability and reliability. Despite the enhanced computational and storage capabilities of larger-scale cloud computing architectures, they introduce significant challenges to traditional graph-based visualization due to issues of hierarchical heterogeneity, scalability, and data incompleteness. This paper proposes a novel abstraction approach to visualize large multi-layer networks. Our method leverages graphons, a probabilistic representation of network layers, to encompass three core steps: an inner-layer summary to identify stable and volatile substructures, an inter-layer mixup for aligning heterogeneous network layers, and a context-aware multi-layer joint sampling technique aimed at reducing network scale while retaining essential topological characteristics. By abstracting complex network data into manageable weighted graphs, with each graph depicting a distinct network layer, our approach renders these intricate systems accessible on standard computing hardware. We validate our methodology through case studies, quantitative experiments and expert evaluations, demonstrating its effectiveness in managing large multi-layer networks, as well as its applicability to broader network types such as transportation and social networks.

With the acceleration of economic globalization, a large amount of research studies have been conducted for the exploration of industrial economics. In the visualization community, common visualization tools present potential features of industrial economics. They hardly meet the various and complex user requirements for insightful analysis and decision-making. In this article, we design VIEA, a web-based visualization system that integrates a rich set of views and tailored interactions, enabling users to easily perceive economic features, such as geographical distributions, trade relationships, and pattern comparisons. Case studies and user studies based on real-world datasets have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in the exploration of industrial economics.

Abstract Visualization and artificial intelligence (AI) are well-applied approaches to data analysis. On one hand, visualization can facilitate humans in data understanding through intuitive visual representation and interactive exploration. On the other hand, AI is able to learn from data and implement bulky tasks for humans. In complex data analysis scenarios, like epidemic traceability and city planning, humans need to understand large-scale data and make decisions, which requires complementing the strengths of both visualization and AI. Existing studies have introduced AI-assisted visualization as AI4VIS and visualization-assisted AI as VIS4AI. However, how can AI and visualization complement each other and be integrated into data analysis processes are still missing. In this paper, we define three integration levels of visualization and AI. The highest integration level is described as the framework of VIS+AI, which allows AI to learn human intelligence from interactions and communicate with humans through visual interfaces. We also summarize future directions of VIS+AI to inspire related studies.

Automatic visualization generates meaningful visualizations to support data analysis and pattern finding for novice or casual users who are not familiar with visualization design. Current automatic visualization approaches adopt mainly aggregation and filtering to extract patterns from the original data. However, these limited data transformations fail to capture complex patterns such as clusters and correlations. Although recent advances in feature engineering provide the potential for more kinds of automatic data transformations, the auto-generated transformations lack explainability concerning how patterns are connected with the original features. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel explainable recommendation approach for extended kinds of data transformations in automatic visualization. We summarize the space of feasible data transformations and measures on explainability of transformation operations with a literature review and a pilot study, respectively. A recommendation algorithm is designed to compute optimal transformations, which can reveal specified types of patterns and maintain explainability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two cases and a user study.