Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry
VisMaster: Visual Analytics - Mastering the Information Age
Participants : Jean-Daniel Fekete [ correspondant ] , Fanny Chevalier, Pierre-Luc Hemery.
VisMaster is a European Coordination Action Project focused on the research discipline of Visual Analytics: One of the most important challenges of the emerging Information Age is to effectively utilise the immense wealth of information and data acquired, computed and stored by modern information systems. On the one hand, the appropriate use of available information volumes offers large potential to realize technological progress and business success. On the other hand, there exists the severe danger that users and analysts easily get lost in irrelevant, or inappropriately processed or presented information, a problem which is generally called the information overload problem. Visual Analytics is an emerging research discipline developing technology to make the best possible use of huge information loads in a wide variety of applications. The basic idea is to appropriately combine the strengths of intelligent automatic data analysis with the visual perception and analysis capabilities of the human user.
With VisMaster, we want to push the limits of today's Visual Analytics. To achieve this goal, we formed a Coordination Action to join European academic and industrial R&D excellence from several individual disciplines, forming a strong Visual Analytics research community. The project is divided into an array of thematic working groups that focus on advancing the state of the art in Visual Analytics. Specifically, the working groups will join excellence in the fields of data management, data analysis, spatial-temporal data, and human visual perceptionresearch with the wider visualisation research community.
The VisMaster Project main goals are to:
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form and shape a strong European Visual Analytics community
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define the European Visual Analytics Research Roadmap
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expose public and private stakeholders to Visual Analytics technology
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set the stage for larger follow-up Visual Analytics research initiatives in Europe.
In the VisMaster project, AVIZ is in charge of the Work Package 4: Infrastructure for Visual Analytics. This work-package is responsible for providing and maintaining the communication infrastructure for the collection of resources in other work-packages and the dissemination of the project results to the public. The scientific management board, consisting of all work-package leaders and chaired by the scientific manager also works in the domain of this work-package and is responsible for the coordination of workshops and the invitation of new community partners.
We have conducted one workshop on software infrastructure for visual analytics and started a google code project called “Obvious” to validate a unified infrastructure for Visual Analytics. Since October, Pierre-Luc Hemery has joined AVIZ as an engineer for 2 years to implement the specifications and organize a software community around it, see http://code.google.com/p/obvious .
The project VisMaster CA acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framwork Programme (FP7) for research of the European Commission (EC) under FET-Open grant number 225429. For more information, see http://www.vismaster.eu .
