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VizSec: Visualization for Computer Security

The 6th International Workshop on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) is a forum that brings together researchers and practitioners in information visualization and security to address the specific needs of the cyber security community through new and insightful visualization techniques. Co-located this year with IEEE VisWeek 2009, VizSec will continue to provide opportunities for the two communities to collaborate and share insights into providing solutions for security needs through visualization approaches. Accepted papers will be published by the IEEE and archived in the IEEE Digital Library. The authors of the best papers will be invited to extend and revise their paper for journal publication in a special issue of Information Visualization. This year our focus is on advancing Visualization for Cyber Security as a scientific discipline. While art, engineering, and intuitions regarding the human element will always remain important if we are to obtain useful cyber security visualizations, advances in the scientific practice of research are needed. The scientific aspects of visualization for cyber security draw both on empirical observation (similar to many natural and social sciences) and formal science (such as the formal derivations in mathematics). Barriers confronting current researchers include concerns about available data, lack of a common agreement about what constitutes sound experimental design, the difficulties of measuring the relative effectiveness of security visualizations in practice, and the lack of a common understanding of user requirements. While many researchers are making progress in these and other critical areas, much work yet remains.

It is common for small groups of people to gather around visual displays of information to discuss or interpret the information to form decisions. Groups can share the task load of exploring large and complex datasets and can share various interpretations of a dataset when working together. However, tools to support synchronous collaboration between several people in their data analysis are still relatively scarce. Traditionally, visualization and visual analytics tools have been designed from a single-user perspective and for desktop computers. While hardware such as multi-touch displays and network capabilities have emerged that lend themselves especially well to collaboration, software support for collaboration around visualizations is still relatively scarce. One of the reasons is that singleuser systems do not necessarily translate well to collaborative scenarios or interactive surfaces and require specific re-design. The design of digital systems for collaboration around visualization and visual analytics systems, therefore, poses additional challenges: we need to understand (a) how people collaboratively work with visual representations of data and which methods they use to solve information analysis tasks as a team, and (b) what the exact design requirements are for collaborative visual analysis scenarios. In this workshop we would like to discuss these challenges and discuss the role of interactive surfaces as an emerging technology for supporting collaborative visualization and visual analytics settings.

The World Wide Web is a primary source of information for many people, but not everything that can be found online when searching for "visualization" would be recognized as such by VisWeek attendees. There is clearly a place for data art, information graphics, mash-ups, etc. — but what is generally considered the core of visualization research (or visual analytics, for that matter) seems underrepresented. And while it is not difficult to find images of many techniques, there is little material that explains, demonstrates, compares, and critiques them. All this is even more true for scientific visualization than for information visualization. To reach more people in the real world, we need to understand the mechanisms for disseminating knowledge outside of the conference or journal paper. A few examples exist where academic visualization research has become successfully popularized, e.g., TreeMaps, ThemeRiver (used in last.fm), StreamGraphs (a well-received New York Times chart of box office revenues). More examples like these are clearly needed, as is more open and accessible information from the people in the field. A blog or website is not just a place for dispensing wisdom, it can provide a platform for experiments and interaction. It also makes it possible to get feedback from readers about real-world problems that might be tackled in research projects. And it can even become the subject of research; Many Eyes is a wonderful example of this. The proposed workshop will give participants the opportunity to learn about experiences, get hints, and discuss issues. Such issues include academic blogging (talk about research before it is published?), finding an audience, promoting a site, etc. The goal of the workshop is to collect ideas and best practices, and to come up with useful solutions to problems posed.

In many ways, the development of a visualization application is similar to a software engineering process, involving technical development and evaluation of methods, development and evaluation of libraries and methods. It therefore follows that reflection and feedback from application experience is needed for refactoring and redesign of future generations of visualization applications. This workshop aims to encourage systematic analysis, review and refactoring of visualization techniques and applications, including: Short anecdotal reports on effectiveness of libraries and applications, case studies of unexpected adaptations of visualization software to user tasks, post facto evaluations, including failure analysis and post-mortems, systematic studies of visualization tools, surveys of commercial, industrial or academic usage patterns, instrumentation and tracing of visualization libraries or applications, requirements analysis for visualization libraries or applications, and reports on refactoring of visualization applications.

The Video Analytics Workshop will focus on tools for analyzing videos whose content ranges from persuasive videos (ads, propaganda, news) to YouTube videos. The purpose of video analysis is to gain insight into the contents of large collections of video and to focus detailed analysis on a smaller set of videos out of that collection. The capability to explore, categorize, and annotate videos is required by multiple types of analysts. User interfaces and techniques that support these activities including techniques in image processing are all central concerns of this workshop. However, the workshop goes beyond retrieval of images to interacting with a large video collection that one may have received from a query. The workshop will be focused around 2-3 presentations followed by an extensive discussion by participants of major issues in the field. The following issues will be open for discussion at the workshop: User interfaces for video analysis that optimize cognition, tools for exploring video collections, applications that categorize videos based on content, annotation schema for video analysis, automated and/or social methods of annotating videos for improved retrieval, image, speech, sound track, and text processing that supports analysis of large video collections, methodologies for determining originator, message, and audience impacts of video, and applications that support reporting the results of the video analysis in a multimedia format.