IEEE VisWeek 2009 will for the first time host a Discovery Exhibition.

It is intended to be a venue for everyone in the visualization community to share stories about the results of applied research and to publish reports on the impact that visualization research or simply visualization use has had on the work and life of people. Sharing these stories with the community will help us all improve our understanding about the role of visualization in work, research, entertainment, and many other areas, after it has moved out of the research realm. To encourage publishing reports about the application of visualization systems to real world problems, we specifically allow submissions that report the impact of previously published work on its user community.

The content of the submissions can be insights, discoveries, or general stories of visualization use in any domain or data. The description should show a real user community. For example, an entry could talk about insights made by a group of environmental scientists trying to find a cause of global warming using a specific visualization. The entry should provide information on the impact that insights (or findings) have had. It is ok to use existing tools. If necessary, the datasets can be anonymized, but no fake data is allowed. Submissions could, for example, include information on:

• What discoveries have users made? What have they learned about their data that they did not know before? What insights have they gained?
• What impact did the findings, insights, or discoveries have on their community?
• What surprising uses of visualization tools were seen? Were tools re-appropriated to answer very different questions than they were designed for?
• What was necessary to integrate a system or tool into everyday work practices? What were the obstacles to introducing new visualization technologies (if any)?

Please submit your entry by clicking here.

Submissions consist of:

• A 2-page write-up following the VisWeek poster template. These should focus on: the domain and data, insights/discoveries/findings and process in which they were acquired, impact of visualization use, and representations, interactions, and tools used if any.
• Optional video submissions that explain your contribution.
• Please check the Discovery Exhibition website frequently for updated information on submission templates, dates, FAQ, and examples.

The contest co-chairs will judge entries based on whether they meet the submission criteria. We will give out awards for various categories based on the quality of the submissions (e.g. quality of the write-up, of the insight, etc.). The exact award categories will depend on the received entries.

All accepted entries will be archived and published on the Discovery Exhibition website. At the conference all accepted submissions will also receive some time to present their stories. Presentations will consist of a poster and a short presentation during a conference session. Please check the website for more detailed information closer to the conference.

Submission deadline: Friday, July 17th, 2009

Jing Yang, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Bongshin Lee, Microsoft Research
Petra Isenberg, University of Calgary
Email: discovery_exhibition@vgtc.org