Context: Complex networks represent systems with non-trivial connections and are widely used in fields such as social media, biology, and transportation. Temporal networks extend this by capturing the evolution of connections over time, providing insights into event sequences and information diffusion. Analyzing these networks requires specialized tools, and Python offers a variety of libraries tailored for this purpose. Objective: This study evaluates Python libraries designed for temporal network analysis based on multiple criteria. The aim is to assess the strengths and limitations of these tools, guide users in selecting appropriate libraries, and identify gaps for future development. Methods: A comparative analysis was conducted on selected Python libraries using predefined evaluation criteria. The assessment considered factors such as available documentation, supported metrics, visualization capabilities, supported format, uniqueness, community support, and popularity. Data were gathered from official documentation, community forums, scientific papers, and usage statistics. Results: Findings indicate that the TGX, Teneto, and PathpyG stand out, excelling in three of five criteria. Networkx-t shows balanced performance with no significant drawbacks, making it a reliable general-purpose choice. However, several tools have limitations in specific areas, such as a lack of comprehensive documentation or advanced visualization features. Conclusion: This review provides an overview of existing Python tools for temporal network analysis, offering insights into their capabilities and shortcomings. The results assist researchers and practitioners in selecting suitable libraries while highlighting areas for improvement and potential future developments in the field.

We present a new nonlinear dimensionality reduction method, MAPLE, that enhances UMAP by improving manifold modeling. MAPLE employs a self-supervised learning approach to more efficiently encode low-dimensional manifold geometry. Central to this approach are maximum manifold capacity representations (MMCRs), which help untangle complex manifolds by compressing variances among locally similar data points while amplifying variance among dissimilar data points. This design is particularly effective for high-dimensional data with substantial intra-cluster variance and curved manifold structures, such as biological or image data. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that MAPLE can produce clearer visual cluster separations and finer subcluster resolution than UMAP while maintaining a tractable computational cost.

Electric power is the foundation of modern society, yet Europe is currently facing an energy crisis, increasing interest in power generation, energy infrastructure, and grid resilience. However, power plant data are complex and multidimensional, making it difficult to gain an overview or understanding. Visualization methods can help to reduce cognitive load and facilitate exploration of such data. In this paper, we propose EuroEnergyVis, a web-based visualization approach designed for the interactive exploration of power plant data across European countries. The design requirements were motivated by gaps identified in prior work. We conducted interviews with six domain experts in power systems and energy, which indicate that our tool enhances the user experience when exploring European power plants. Their reflections also suggest directions for future work.

Abstract As the complexity of machine learning (ML) models increases and their application in different (and critical) domains grows, there is a strong demand for more interpretable and trustworthy ML. A direct, model‐agnostic, way to interpret such models is to train surrogate models—such as rule sets and decision trees—that sufficiently approximate the original ones while being simpler and easier‐to‐explain. Yet, rule sets can become very lengthy, with many if–else statements, and decision tree depth grows rapidly when accurately emulating complex ML models. In such cases, both approaches can fail to meet their core goal—providing users with model interpretability. To tackle this, we propose DeforestVis, a visual analytics tool that offers summarization of the behaviour of complex ML models by providing surrogate decision stumps (one‐level decision trees) generated with the Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) technique. DeforestVis helps users to explore the complexity versus fidelity trade‐off by incrementally generating more stumps, creating attribute‐based explanations with weighted stumps to justify decision making, and analysing the impact of rule overriding on training instance allocation between one or more stumps. An independent test set allows users to monitor the effectiveness of manual rule changes and form hypotheses based on case‐by‐case analyses. We show the applicability and usefulness of DeforestVis with two use cases and expert interviews with data analysts and model developers.

Relational information between different types of entities is often modelled by a multilayer network (MLN) - a network with subnetworks represented by layers. The layers of an MLN can be arranged in different ways in a visual representation, however, the impact of the arrangement on the readability of the network is an open question. Therefore, we studied this impact for several commonly occurring tasks related to MLN analysis. Additionally, layer arrangements with a dimensionality beyond 2D, which are common in this scenario, motivate the use of stereoscopic displays. We ran a human subject study utilising a Virtual Reality headset to evaluate 2D, 2.5D, and 3D layer arrangements. The study employs six analysis tasks that cover the spectrum of an MLN task taxonomy, from path finding and pattern identification to comparisons between and across layers. We found no clear overall winner. However, we explore the task-to-arrangement space and derive empirical-based recommendations on the effective use of 2D, 2.5D, and 3D layer arrangements for MLNs.

Stacking (or stacked generalization) is an ensemble learning method with one main distinctiveness from the rest: even though several base models are trained on the original data set, their predictions are further used as input data for one or more metamodels arranged in at least one extra layer. Composing a stack of models can produce high-performance outcomes, but it usually involves a trial-and-error process. Therefore, our previously developed visual analytics sys-tem, StackGenVis, was mainly designed to assist users in choosing a set of top-performing and diverse models by measuring their predictive performance. However, it only employs a single logistic regression metamodel. In this paper, we investigate the impact of alternative metamodels on the performance of stacking ensembles using a novel visualization tool, called MetaStackVis. Our interactive tool helps users to visually explore different singular and pairs of metamodels according to their predictive probabilities and multiple validation metrics, as well as their ability to predict specific problematic data instances. MetaStackVis was evaluated with a usage scenario based on a medical data set and via expert interviews.

Embeddings are powerful tools for transforming complex and unstructured data into numeric formats suitable for computational analysis tasks. In this paper, we extend our previous work on using multiple embeddings for text similarity calculations to the field of networks. The embedding ensemble approach improves network reconstruction performance compared to single-embedding strategies. Our visual analytics methodology is successful in handling both text and network data, which demonstrates its generalizability beyond its originally presented scope.

Abstract Despite the tremendous advances in machine learning (ML), training with imbalanced data still poses challenges in many real‐world applications. Among a series of diverse techniques to solve this problem, sampling algorithms are regarded as an efficient solution. However, the problem is more fundamental, with many works emphasizing the importance of instance hardness. This issue refers to the significance of managing unsafe or potentially noisy instances that are more likely to be misclassified and serve as the root cause of poor classification performance. This paper introduces HardVis, a visual analytics system designed to handle instance hardness mainly in imbalanced classification scenarios. Our proposed system assists users in visually comparing different distributions of data types, selecting types of instances based on local characteristics that will later be affected by the active sampling method, and validating which suggestions from undersampling or oversampling techniques are beneficial for the ML model. Additionally, rather than uniformly undersampling/oversampling a specific class, we allow users to find and sample easy and difficult to classify training instances from all classes. Users can explore subsets of data from different perspectives to decide all those parameters, while HardVis keeps track of their steps and evaluates the model's predictive performance in a test set separately. The end result is a well‐balanced data set that boosts the predictive power of the ML model. The efficacy and effectiveness of HardVis are demonstrated with a hypothetical usage scenario and a use case. Finally, we also look at how useful our system is based on feedback we received from ML experts.

Abstract Over the past years, an increasing number of publications in information visualization, especially within the field of visual analytics, have mentioned the term “embedding” when describing the computational approach. Within this context, embeddings are usually (relatively) low‐dimensional, distributed representations of various data types (such as texts or graphs), and since they have proven to be extremely useful for a variety of data analysis tasks across various disciplines and fields, they have become widely used. Existing visualization approaches aim to either support exploration and interpretation of the embedding space through visual representation and interaction, or aim to use embeddings as part of the computational pipeline for addressing downstream analytical tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey that takes a detailed look at embedding methods through the lens of visual analytics, and the purpose of our survey article is to provide a systematic overview of the state of the art within the emerging field of embedding visualization. We design a categorization scheme for our approach, analyze the current research frontier based on peer‐reviewed publications, and discuss existing trends, challenges, and potential research directions for using embeddings in the context of visual analytics. Furthermore, we provide an interactive survey browser for the collected and categorized survey data, which currently includes 122 entries that appeared between 2007 and 2023.

Stacked generalization (also called stacking) is an ensemble method in machine learning that deploys a metamodel to summarize the predictive results of heterogeneous base models organized into one or more layers. Despite being capable of producing high-performance results, building a stack of models can be a trial-and-error procedure. Thus, our previously developed visual analytics system, entitled StackGen Vis, was designed to monitor and control the entire stacking process visually. In this work, we present the results of a comparative user study we performed for evaluating the StackGen-Vis system. We divided the study participants into two groups to test the usability and effectiveness of StackGen Vis compared to Orange Visual Stacking (OVS) in an exploratory usage scenario using health-care data. The results indicate that StackGen Vis is significantly more powerful than OVS based on the qualitative feedback provided by the participants. However, the average completion time for all tasks was comparable between both tools.

The machine learning (ML) life cycle involves a series of iterative steps, from the effective gathering and preparation of the data-including complex feature engineering processes-to the presentation and improvement of results, with various algorithms to choose from in every step. Feature engineering in particular can be very beneficial for ML, leading to numerous improvements such as boosting the predictive results, decreasing computational times, reducing excessive noise, and increasing the transparency behind the decisions taken during the training. Despite that, while several visual analytics tools exist to monitor and control the different stages of the ML life cycle (especially those related to data and algorithms), feature engineering support remains inadequate. In this paper, we present FeatureEnVi, a visual analytics system specifically designed to assist with the feature engineering process. Our proposed system helps users to choose the most important feature, to transform the original features into powerful alternatives, and to experiment with different feature generation combinations. Additionally, data space slicing allows users to explore the impact of features on both local and global scales. FeatureEnVi utilizes multiple automatic feature selection techniques; furthermore, it visually guides users with statistical evidence about the influence of each feature (or subsets of features). The final outcome is the extraction of heavily engineered features, evaluated by multiple validation metrics. The usefulness and applicability of FeatureEnVi are demonstrated with two use cases and a case study. We also report feedback from interviews with two ML experts and a visualization researcher who assessed the effectiveness of our system.

Abstract During the training phase of machine learning (ML) models, it is usually necessary to configure several hyperparameters. This process is computationally intensive and requires an extensive search to infer the best hyperparameter set for the given problem. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most ML models are complex internally, and training involves trial‐and‐error processes that could remarkably affect the predictive result. Moreover, each hyperparameter of an ML algorithm is potentially intertwined with the others, and changing it might result in unforeseeable impacts on the remaining hyperparameters. Evolutionary optimization is a promising method to try and address those issues. According to this method, performant models are stored, while the remainder are improved through crossover and mutation processes inspired by genetic algorithms. We present VisEvol, a visual analytics tool that supports interactive exploration of hyperparameters and intervention in this evolutionary procedure. In summary, our proposed tool helps the user to generate new models through evolution and eventually explore powerful hyperparameter combinations in diverse regions of the extensive hyperparameter space. The outcome is a voting ensemble (with equal rights) that boosts the final predictive performance. The utility and applicability of VisEvol are demonstrated with two use cases and interviews with ML experts who evaluated the effectiveness of the tool.

In machine learning (ML), ensemble methods-such as bagging, boosting, and stacking-are widely-established approaches that regularly achieve top-notch predictive performance. Stacking (also called "stacked generalization") is an ensemble method that combines heterogeneous base models, arranged in at least one layer, and then employs another metamodel to summarize the predictions of those models. Although it may be a highly-effective approach for increasing the predictive performance of ML, generating a stack of models from scratch can be a cumbersome trial-and-error process. This challenge stems from the enormous space of available solutions, with different sets of data instances and features that could be used for training, several algorithms to choose from, and instantiations of these algorithms using diverse parameters (i.e., models) that perform differently according to various metrics. In this work, we present a knowledge generation model, which supports ensemble learning with the use of visualization, and a visual analytics system for stacked generalization. Our system, StackGenVis, assists users in dynamically adapting performance metrics, managing data instances, selecting the most important features for a given data set, choosing a set of top-performant and diverse algorithms, and measuring the predictive performance. In consequence, our proposed tool helps users to decide between distinct models and to reduce the complexity of the resulting stack by removing overpromising and underperforming models. The applicability and effectiveness of StackGenVis are demonstrated with two use cases: a real-world healthcare data set and a collection of data related to sentiment/stance detection in texts. Finally, the tool has been evaluated through interviews with three ML experts.

Dimensionality reduction methods, also known as projections, are frequently used in multidimensional data exploration in machine learning, data science, and information visualization. Tens of such techniques have been proposed, aiming to address a wide set of requirements, such as ability to show the high-dimensional data structure, distance or neighborhood preservation, computational scalability, stability to data noise and/or outliers, and practical ease of use. However, it is far from clear for practitioners how to choose the best technique for a given use context. We present a survey of a wide body of projection techniques that helps answering this question. For this, we characterize the input data space, projection techniques, and the quality of projections, by several quantitative metrics. We sample these three spaces according to these metrics, aiming at good coverage with bounded effort. We describe our measurements and outline observed dependencies of the measured variables. Based on these results, we draw several conclusions that help comparing projection techniques, explain their results for different types of data, and ultimately help practitioners when choosing a projection for a given context. Our methodology, datasets, projection implementations, metrics, visualizations, and results are publicly open, so interested stakeholders can examine and/or extend this benchmark.

The visualization of a network influences the quality of the mental map that the viewer develops to understand the network. In this study, we investigate the effects of a 3D immersive visualization environment compared to a traditional 2D desktop environment on the comprehension of a network’s structure. We compare the two visualization environments using three tasks—interpreting network structure, memorizing a set of nodes, and identifying the structural changes—commonly used for evaluating the quality of a mental map in network visualization. The results show that participants were able to interpret network structure more accurately when viewing the network in an immersive environment, particularly for larger networks. However, we found that 2D visualizations performed better than immersive visualization for tasks that required spatial memory.

Abstract Machine learning (ML) models are nowadays used in complex applications in various domains, such as medicine, bioinformatics, and other sciences. Due to their black box nature, however, it may sometimes be hard to understand and trust the results they provide. This has increased the demand for reliable visualization tools related to enhancing trust in ML models, which has become a prominent topic of research in the visualization community over the past decades. To provide an overview and present the frontiers of current research on the topic, we present a State‐of‐the‐Art Report (STAR) on enhancing trust in ML models with the use of interactive visualization. We define and describe the background of the topic, introduce a categorization for visualization techniques that aim to accomplish this goal, and discuss insights and opportunities for future research directions. Among our contributions is a categorization of trust against different facets of interactive ML, expanded and improved from previous research. Our results are investigated from different analytical perspectives: (a) providing a statistical overview, (b) summarizing key findings, (c) performing topic analyses, and (d) exploring the data sets used in the individual papers, all with the support of an interactive web‐based survey browser. We intend this survey to be beneficial for visualization researchers whose interests involve making ML models more trustworthy, as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in their search for effective visualization techniques suitable for solving their tasks with confidence and conveying meaning to their data.

t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) for the visualization of multidimensional data has proven to be a popular approach, with successful applications in a wide range of domains. Despite their usefulness, t-SNE projections can be hard to interpret or even misleading, which hurts the trustworthiness of the results. Understanding the details of t-SNE itself and the reasons behind specific patterns in its output may be a daunting task, especially for non-experts in dimensionality reduction. In this article, we present t-viSNE, an interactive tool for the visual exploration of t-SNE projections that enables analysts to inspect different aspects of their accuracy and meaning, such as the effects of hyper-parameters, distance and neighborhood preservation, densities and costs of specific neighborhoods, and the correlations between dimensions and visual patterns. We propose a coherent, accessible, and well-integrated collection of different views for the visualization of t-SNE projections. The applicability and usability of t-viSNE are demonstrated through hypothetical usage scenarios with real data sets. Finally, we present the results of a user study where the tool's effectiveness was evaluated. By bringing to light information that would normally be lost after running t-SNE, we hope to support analysts in using t-SNE and making its results better understandable.

Software evolution analysis can shed light on various aspects of software development and maintenance. Up to date, there is little empirical evidence on the evolution of JavaScript (JS) applications in terms of maintainability and changeability, even though JavaScript is among the most popular scripting languages for front-end web applications, including IoT applications. In this study, we investigate JS applications’ quality and changeability trends over time by examining the relevant Laws of Lehman. We analyzed over 7,500 releases of JS applications and reached some interesting conclusions. The results show that JS applications continuously change and grow, there are no clear signs of quality degradation while the complexity remains the same over time, despite the fact that the understandability of the code deteriorates.

Many common data analysis and machine learning algorithms for time series, such as classification, clustering, or dimensionality reduction, require a distance measurement between pairs of time series in order to determine their similarity. A variety of measures can be found in the literature, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance measure has occupied an important place since its early applications for the analysis and recognition of spoken word. The main disadvantage of the DTW algorithm is, however, its quadratic time and space complexity, which limits its practical use to relatively small time series. This issue is even more problematic when dealing with streaming time series that are continuously updated, since the analysis must be re-executed regularly and with strict running time constraints. In this paper, we describe enhancements to the DTW algorithm that allow it to be used efficiently in a streaming scenario by supporting an append operation for new time steps with a linear complexity when an exact, error-free DTW is needed, and even better performance when either a Sakoe-Chiba band is used, or when a sliding window is the desired range for the data. Our experiments with one synthetic and four natural data sets have shown that it outperforms other DTW implementations and the potential errors are, in general, much lower than another state-of-the-art approximated DTW technique.

Both the metadata and the textual contents of scientific publications can provide us with insights about the development and the current state of the corresponding scientific community. In this short paper, we take a look at the proceedings of VINCI from the previous years and conduct several types of analyses. We summarize the yearly statistics about different types of publications, identify the overall authorship statistics and the most prominent contributors, and analyze the current community structure with a co-authorship network. We also apply topic modeling to identify the most prominent topics discussed in the publications. We hope that the results of our work will provide insights for the visualization community and will also be used as an overview for researchers previously unfamiliar with VINCI.

The analysis of various opinions and arguments in textual data can be facilitated by automatic topic modeling methods; however, the exploration and interpretation of the resulting topics and terms may prove to be difficult to the analysts. Opinions, stances, arguments, topics, terms, and text documents are usually connected with many-to-many relationships for such tasks. Exploratory visual analysis with interactive tools can help the analysts to get an overview of the topics and opinions, identify particularly interesting documents, and describe main themes of various arguments. In our previous work, we introduced an interactive tool called Topics2Themes that was used for topic and theme analysis of vaccination-related discussion texts with a limited set of stance categories. In this poster paper, we describe an application of Topics2Themes to a different genre of data, namely, political comments from Reddit, and multiple sentiment and stance categories detected with automatic classifiers.

Assessing software quality, in general, is hard; each metric has a different interpretation, scale, range of values, or measurement method. Combining these metrics automatically is especially difficult, because they measure different aspects of software quality, and creating a single global final quality score limits the evaluation of the specific quality aspects and trade-offs that exist when looking at different metrics. We present a way to visualize multiple aspects of software quality. In general, software quality can be decomposed hierarchically into characteristics, which can be assessed by various direct and indirect metrics. These characteristics are then combined and aggregated to assess the quality of the software system as a whole. We introduce an approach for quality assessment based on joint distributions of metrics values. Visualizations of these distributions allow users to explore and compare the quality metrics of software systems and their artifacts, and to detect patterns, correlations, and anomalies. Furthermore, it is possible to identify common properties and flaws, as our visualization approach provides rich interactions for visual queries to the quality models' multivariate data. We evaluate our approach in two use cases based on: 30 real-world technical documentation projects with 20,000 XML documents, and an open source project written in Java with 1000 classes. Our results show that the proposed approach allows an analyst to detect possible causes of bad or good quality.

Abstract Visualization of sentiments and opinions extracted from or annotated in texts has become a prominent topic of research over the last decade. From basic pie and bar charts used to illustrate customer reviews to extensive visual analytics systems involving novel representations, sentiment visualization techniques have evolved to deal with complex multidimensional data sets, including temporal, relational and geospatial aspects. This contribution presents a survey of sentiment visualization techniques based on a detailed categorization. We describe the background of sentiment analysis, introduce a categorization for sentiment visualization techniques that includes 7 groups with 35 categories in total, and discuss 132 techniques from peer‐reviewed publications together with an interactive web‐based survey browser. Finally, we discuss insights and opportunities for further research in sentiment visualization. We expect this survey to be useful for visualization researchers whose interests include sentiment or other aspects of text data as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in search of efficient visualization techniques applicable to their tasks and data.

Abstract We propose a new graph layout method based on a modification of the t‐distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t‐SNE) dimensionality reduction technique. Although t‐SNE is one of the best techniques for visualizing high‐dimensional data as 2D scatterplots, t‐SNE has not been used in the context of classical graph layout. We propose a new graph layout method, tsNET, based on representing a graph with a distance matrix, which together with a modified t‐SNE cost function results in desirable layouts. We evaluate our method by a formal comparison with state‐of‐the‐art methods, both visually and via established quality metrics on a comprehensive benchmark, containing real‐world and synthetic graphs. As evidenced by the quality metrics and visual inspection, tsNET produces excellent layouts.

The automatic detection and classification of stance (e.g., certainty or agreement) in text data using natural language processing and machine-learning methods creates an opportunity to gain insight into the speakers’ attitudes toward their own and other people’s utterances. However, identifying stance in text presents many challenges related to training data collection and classifier training. To facilitate the entire process of training a stance classifier, we propose a visual analytics approach, called ALVA, for text data annotation and visualization. ALVA’s interplay with the stance classifier follows an active learning strategy to select suitable candidate utterances for manual annotaion. Our approach supports annotation process management and provides the annotators with a clean user interface for labeling utterances with multiple stance categories. ALVA also contains a visualization method to help analysts of the annotation and training process gain a better understanding of the categories used by the annotators. The visualization uses a novel visual representation, called CatCombos, which groups individual annotation items by the combination of stance categories. Additionally, our system makes a visualization of a vector space model available that is itself based on utterances. ALVA is already being used by our domain experts in linguistics and computational linguistics to improve the understanding of stance phenomena and to build a stance classifier for applications such as social media monitoring.

Learning more about people mobility is an important task for official decision makers and urban planners. Mobility data sets characterize the variation of the presence of people in different places over time as well as movements (or flows) of people between the places. The analysis of mobility data is challenging due to the need to analyze and compare spatial situations (i.e., presence and flows of people at certain time moments) and to gain an understanding of the spatio-temporal changes (variations of situations over time). Traditional flow visualizations usually fail due to massive clutter. Modern approaches offer limited support for investigating the complex variation of the movements over longer time periods. We propose a visual analytics methodology that solves these issues by combined spatial and temporal simplifications. We have developed a graph-based method, called MobilityGraphs, which reveals movement patterns that were occluded in flow maps. Our method enables the visual representation of the spatio-temporal variation of movements for long time series of spatial situations originally containing a large number of intersecting flows. The interactive system supports data exploration from various perspectives and at various levels of detail by interactive setting of clustering parameters. The feasibility our approach was tested on aggregated mobility data derived from a set of geolocated Twitter posts within the Greater London city area and mobile phone call data records in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. We could show that MobilityGraphs support the identification of regular daily and weekly movement patterns of resident population.

Text visualization has become a growing and increasingly important subfield of information visualization. Thus, it is getting harder for researchers to look for related work with specific tasks or visual metaphors in mind. In this paper, we present an interactive visual survey of text visualization techniques that can be used for the purposes of search for related work, introduction to the subfield and gaining insight into research trends. We describe the taxonomy used for categorization of text visualization techniques and compare it to approaches employed in several other surveys. Finally, we present results of analyses performed on the entries data.

The amount of data produced in the world every day implies a huge challenge in understanding and extracting knowledge from it. Much of this data is of relational nature, such as social networks, metabolic pathways, or links between software components. Traditionally, those networks are represented as node-link diagrams or matrix representations. They help us to understand the structure (topology) of the relational data. However in many real world data sets, additional (often multidimensional) attributes are attached to the network elements. One challenge is to show these attributes in context of the underlying network topology in order to support the user in further analyses. In this paper, we present a novel approach that extends traditional force-based graph layouts to create an attribute-driven layout. In addition, our prototype implementation supports interactive exploration by introducing clustering and multidimensional scaling into the analysis process.

Intuitive and efficient interaction techniques are a fundamental component of most visualization tools. The integration of interaction techniques into visual representations (and automatic analysis methods in visual analytics) supports the human-information discourse and can be realized in various ways. But we also have to take care that our interaction and visual representation techniques are validated in order to get a clear understanding of their efficiency and usability. In this talk, I will explore current and identify future trends in the development of novel interaction and evaluation techniques for information visualization and related fields. Here, I especially want to highlight recent findings in the use of brain-computer interfaces to adapt and evaluate visualizations.

On the basis of a large corpus of wine reviews, this paper proposes a range of interactive visualization techniques that are useful for linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical, grammatical and discursive patterns in text. Our visualization tool allows linguists and others to make comparisons of visual, olfactory, gustatory and textual properties of different wines from different parts of the worlds, from different grape varieties, or from different vintages. It also supports the immediate creation of visual profiles for descriptions of sensory perceptions for exploratory purposes as well as for purposes of confirmatory investigations of linguistic patterns in text and discourse and their correlations to metadata variables.

Networks are widely used in modeling relational data often comprised of thousands of nodes and edges. This kind of data alone implies a challenge for its visualization as it is hard to avoid clutter of network elements if using traditional node-link diagrams. Moreover, real-life network data sets usually represent objects with a large number of additional attributes that need to be visualized, such as in software engineering, social network analysis, or biochemistry. In this paper, we present a novel approach, called Network Lens, to visualize such attributes in context of the underlying network. Our implementation of the Network Lens is an interactive tool that extends the idea of so-called magic lenses in such a way that users can interactively build and combine various lenses by specifying different attributes and selecting suitable visual representations.

Interaction between particles in so-called granular media, such as soil and sand, plays an important role in the context of geomechanical phenomena and numerous industrial applications. A two scale homogenization approach based on a micro and a macro scale level is briefly introduced in this paper. Computation of granular material in such a way gives a deeper insight into the context of discontinuous materials and at the same time reduces the computational costs. However, the description and the understanding of the phenomena in granular materials are not yet satisfactory. A sophisticated problem-specific visualization technique would significantly help to illustrate failure phenomena on the microscopic level. As main contribution, we present a novel 2D approach for the visualization of simulation data, based on the above outlined homogenization technique. Our visualization tool supports visualization on micro scale level as well as on macro scale level. The tool shows both aspects closely arranged in form of multiple coordinated views to give users the possibility to analyze the particle behavior effectively. A novel type of interactive rose diagrams was developed to represent the dynamic contact networks on the micro scale level in a condensed and efficient way.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) produce a vast amount of data by recurring processes, e.g., selection, recombination, or mutation, that work on populations of solutions for a specific problem. In order to get a better insight into the progress of EAs a Java-based visualization tool, called EAVis, was developed. Several coordinated views help the user to watch each generation step of the EA and to derive knowledge as well as better understanding of the underlying evolutionary computational models.

The use of generic and generative methods for the development and application of interactive educational software is a relatively unexplored area in industry and education. Advantages of generic and generative techniques are, among other things, the high degree of reusability of systems parts and the reduction of development costs. Furthermore, generative methods can be used for the development or realization of novel learning models. In this paper, we discuss such a learning model that propagates a new way of explorative learning in computer science education with the help of generators. A realization of this model represents the educational software GANIFA on the theory of generating finite automata from regular expressions. In addition to the educational system's description, we present an evaluation of this system.

Visualization of computational models is at the heart of educational software for computer science and related fields. In this paper we look at how generation of such visualizations and the visualization of the generation process itself increase exploration. Four approaches of increased exploration in formal language theory and compiler design are introduced and for each approach we discuss an educational system which implements it.