Visual Analytics and Information Retrievalfire/2012/slides/keynote_visual...Fire 2012, Kolkata 19...

Visual Analyticsand Information Retrieval

Giuseppe SantucciDipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica

Sapienza Università di [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Who am I? (University of Rome is so big…)

• VisDis and the Database & User Interface groups are two tightly connected research groups at the Department of Computer and System Science (32 full professors, 19 associate ,and 13 assistant professors) of Rome Faculty of Engineering & ICT ?

• The VisDis and the Database/Interface group background is about:– Visual Information Access– Data quality– Data integration– User Centered Design– Usability and Accessibility– Infovis evaluation– Visual quality metrics– Visual Analytics

• Data sampling • Density map optimization

– Information Retrieval (&VA)

Fire 2012, Kolkata 19 December 2012 VA & IR - Giuseppe Santucci 2

Outline

• Information Visualization– Definitions– Main issues

• Data overloading– Visual Analytics– Visual Analytics challenges

• One methodological examples• VA and Information Retrieval• Demo


Information Visualization?

• Old stuff…


Visualization for Problem Solving

• Mystery: what is causing a cholera epidemic in London in 1854?




Illustration of Dr. John Snow (1854)

Dots indicate location of deaths

X indicate the locationof water pumps

[From Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte, Graphics Press, 1997]


7

Dr. Snow deducted that the cholera epidemic was caused by a contaminated water pump !!!Closing that pump quickly solved the problem

B.T.W., workers at the nearby brewery were noted to be relatively free of cholera…

The actual John Snow pub in London close to the water pump !!!

Visualization for Explaining


What happened during the Napoleon’s Russian Campaign?

The Charles Joseph Minard’s map (1861)


Visualization for Making decision


Traveling in London by underground

How can I get Queens Park from Victoria station?

London Underground Map 1927


The Harry Beck’s idea

• Real position (when traveling in underground) does not matter

• Only station sequences matter together with their connections

• Beck proposed a “distorted” map• Actually all the underground

maps in the world follow the Beck’s approach

• He got a little payment (London underground was not sure about the idea)

• Still true right now: infovis people do not become rich…

• Likely that holds for VA and IR as well L


London Underground Map 1990s


Moving to the present time

• What is modern Information Visualization ?

• First of all, what is Visualization ?

• Visualize: to form a mental model or mental image of something

• It is a cognitive activity and it has nothing to do with computers


What is Information Visualization?

Information visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations

of abstract data to amplify cognition.

[Card et al. ‘99]


Information visualization !

1. Infovis is perfect for exploration, when we don’t know exactly what to look at. It supports vague goals

2. Infovis is perfect to explain complex data and to support decisions

• Other approaches to data analysis– Statistics: strong verification but does not support exploration

and vague goals– Data mining: actionable and reliable but black box, not

interactive, question-response style– Visual Analytics (formerly Visual Data Mining) is trying to join

the two worlds

…computer supported and interactive

• Computer-supported– Yes we use computers, but we have to

always remember that a cognitive activityis involved in the process

• Interactive– To exploit the full power of Infovis techniques

interaction is mandatory.


Interaction example

• Agronomists are experimenting 7 treatments (anti-parasite, fertilizer, etc.) on 10 different crops (corn, tomatoes, etc.)

• A black square indicates success• Does this visualization help?


TreatmentsA B C D E F G

123456789

10

Crops

Rearrange

Interaction example• Let’s rearrange the rows


TreatmentsA B C D E F G

123456789

10

Crops10

A D C E G B F13826

4795

Treatments

Crops

Rearrange

(10! L, VA can help…)

…it is about abstract data

• Abstract data– Information visualization deals with images that does not

refer to physical situation. In other words it is NOT scientific visualization/geographic visualization

• Scientific visualization primarily relates to and represents something physical or geometric

• Examples– Air flow over a wing– Weather over USA– Torrents inside a tornado– Organs in the human body– Molecular bonding…


Scientific/geographic visualization


Earthquake intensity

…abstract data

• Items that do not have a direct physical/visual correspondence• Examples: sport statistics, stock trends, query results, software data,

IR metrics, etc…• Items are represented on a 2D / 3D physical space using their

numerical characteristics (attributes)• The visualization is useful for analysis and decision-making (not just

for fun or colors)• E.g. : Postal parcels

– Shipping date– Volume– Weight– Sender country– Receiver country– …


Abstract data


A 2D Scatterplot showing about 200.000 postal parcels

Mixed visualization

Byte traffic into the ANS/NSFNET T3 backbone in 1993

Amplify cognition using the human vision

• Highest bandwidth human sense• Fast, parallel• Pattern recognition• Extends memory and cognitive capacity• People think visually (I see… means also I understand in

most languages)• Amplify cognition• Pre-attentive (we use only the eyes, not the brain)

• Two quick examples (4 seconds each)

Three simple questions

The quick answers

One (very) simple question

• How many 3s here ?• You have 4 seconds…

458757626808609928083982698028747976296262867897187743671947746588786758967329667287682085

So ?

• Time was not enough?

• You can do that in less than 0.2 seconds !

• Let’s try a different visualization…

• Color is pre-attentive (pops up)• No cognitive effort is required• A lot of issues are already clear• Most of people ignore them...• It is not enough to use wrist and

bells

Canonical steps in Infovis – STEP 1


DATA InternalRepresentation

Encoding of valuesUnivariate dataBivariate dataTrivariate dataMultidimensional data

Encoding of relationshipsTemporal dataMap & DiagramsGraphs/TreesData streams

Sport

Literature

Mathematics

Physics

History

Geography

Art

Chemistry

Canonical steps in infovis – STEP 2


InternalRepresentation

Space limitationsScrollingOverview + detailsDistortionSuppressionZoom & panSemantic zoom

Time limitationPerceptual issuesCognitive issues

Presentation

Problem solved!


We have (∼) agreed and (∼) mature solutions forPresentationRepresentation

of a large variety of data

So I’m done!

Questions ?

Data size and complexity !

• 100 million FedEx transactions per day• 150 million VISA credit card transactions per day • 300 million long distance ATT calls per day• 50 billion e-mails per day• 600 billion IP packets per day• 1 trillion (1012) of web pages (according to

Google), corresponding to about 3 petabytes of data

• Google processes 20 petabytes of data per dayFire 2012, Kolkata 19 December 2012 VA & IR - Giuseppe Santucci

Size matters but complexity matters as well!

• Formal definition of the PROMISE experimental data (FIRE will use very similar pieces of information)

• Metadata– ~100 metrics per topic – It is not a BIG number but…

• Different level of analysis – per topic– per experiment– ...

• Different level of abstraction– Simple (!) metrics– Aggregate metrics– Statistics– Meta statistics (e.g., correlation, ANOVA, etc…)


Rescuing information• In different situations people need to exploit and to use hidden

information resting in unexplored large and/or complex data sets• Several techniques exist devoted to this aim

– Automatic analysis techniques (e.g., data mining)– Manual analysis techniques (e.g., Information visualization)

• Large and complex datasets require a joint effort:


Visual Analytics


VA is highly interdisciplinary


Scientific & Information

Visualisation

Data Management

Data Mining

Spatio-Temporal

Data

Human Perception+CognitionInfrastructure Infrastructure

Evaluation Evaluation

Each component presents challenging issues

Perception and cognition

• A critical element is the human being (☺)– Visual analysis tasks require the careful

design of apt human-computer interfaces– Challenges: need to integrate Psychology,

Sociology, Neurosciences, and Design issues



Let’s have fun: different kinds of blindness

In the movie, the girl with the white t-shirt is going to receive the ball several timesCount how many times she receives (disregarding knocking up on the floor)


Ready ?


So...

• 6 times ?• 7 times ?• 8 times ?• 9 times ?• 10 times ?


Fine… and now another question…

• How many gorillas were in the video ?


Let us to have a closer look

Same video…


Inattentional blindness• Just one gorilla…

• It looks like a joke but reflects real problems that we have not to neglect

• Inattentional (and change) blindness must to be carefully considered when designing (critical) systems

• Animation, interaction, and alternative communication means (e.g., sounds) can mitigate the problem

A methodologicalexample

A Visual Analytics exampleDeriving new values from the dataset for ad-

hoc visualization• How to visually compare J. London and M. Twain

books ?• [D. A. Keim and D. Oelke. Literature Fingerprinting: A New Method for Visual

Literary Analysis. 2007 IEEE Symp. on Visual Analytics Science andTechnology (VAST '07) ]

1. Split the book in several text block (e.g., pages, paragraph, sentences)

2. Measure, for each text block, a relevant feature (e.g., average sentence length, word usage, etc. )

3. Associate the relevant feature to a visual attribute (e.g., color)

4. Visualize itFire 2012, Kolkata 19 December 2012 VA & IR - Giuseppe Santucci 47

J.London vs M.Twain average sentence lengths


User interaction (a non uniform book?)


Details of a book


What about the Bible?


The Vismaster CA European project


The new (European) book on VA • Illuminating the path : The

Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics– 2005, focusing on USA

homeland security

• Managing the Information Age Solving Problems with Visual Analytics– One of the major outcome of

Vismaster– 2010, much broader focus


Now, let’s move to IRA case study: the Promise Project

• Step 1: Data preprocessing


1: Clear understanding of experimental data


Enriching the data Define a data structure

Define formal transformations on the data

2: Visualization


2a: Define a visual reference architecture


2a: Define a set of visualizations


3: Defining analytical models and their relationship with visualizations


3: Automated analysis (machine learning, clustering, etc.) for ranking analysis

• Emanuele Di Buccio, Marco Dussin, Nicola Ferro, Ivano Masiero, Giuseppe Santucci and Giuseppe Tino - To Re-Rank or To Re-Query: Can Visual Analytics Solve This Dilemma? -Proc of the CLEF 2011 , Amsterdam.

• Marco Angelini, Nicola Ferro, Granato Guido, Giuseppe Santucci, Gianmaria Silvello -Information Retrieval Failure Analysis: Visual Analytics as a Support for Interactive ”What-If” Investigation - VAST 2012 , 2012

4: Knowledge(hum, waiting for the system being used

by real IR experts…)


Demo


Demo!


Conclusions• Visual Analytics is a new (exciting) emerging

research field• Infovis and data mining are core components of

VA• It is highly interdisciplinary and require a

collaborative approach• It is more a methodology than a technique• To succeed it has to challenge several high-risk

issues• It is the only chance we have to dominate large

and complex datasets• Including IR evaluation dataFire 2012, Kolkata 19 December 2012 VA & IR - Giuseppe Santucci 64

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