Sunday, All Day
Metrics for the Evaluation of Visual Analytics

Organizers:	Jean Scholtz, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
	Georges Grinstein, University of Massachusetts Lowell
	Catherine Plaisant, University of Maryland

Participants are requested to submit positions papers by September 15,2007. Please click here for details.

The field of visual analytics is now recognized as a research area in many universities and organizations. As new fields develop ways of assessing progress in those fields also emerge. In the field of visual analytics, we are fortunate in that we already have lessons learned about evaluating visualizations. Unfortunately, these lessons still point out that this is a difficult problem. Visual analytics compounds this problem by adding more dimensions; not only are we concerned with some measure of the visualizations, but we are concerned with evaluating the impact these visualizations have in helping analysts in their work.

User-centered evaluations are vital in visual analytics as they contribute greatly to adoption of research software. The issues we face in developing user-centered evaluations for visual analytics are selecting:

• The task: the tradeoff is between simple tasks that are easily evaluated and developing a more realistic task that consumes more time and is much less straightforward to evaluate.
• The corresponding dataset: the same issues as above plus the issues of developing a publicly releasable dataset that resembles a realistic dataset
• The system and environment: how much does the system or environment play a role in the utility or success of the task.
• The participants: using senior analysts or junior analysts and ensuring that analysts are open to new technology
• Training: how much training to provide to analysts or whether analysts should be paired with technologists to operate the software
• The metrics: what combination of quantitative and qualitative measures will be accepted? How can we ensure that qualitative measures meet are collected with some rigor? How can we measure insights that were derived from the visualization and interactions with the visualization? This is especially problematic as not all analysts approach problems in the same fashion. Most importantly, what measures are most helpful to the analytic community and to the research community?

Sunday, Afternoon
Visualization Forum: Enabling Science Discoveries through Visual Exploration

Organizers:	Kelly Gaither, University of Texas, Austin
	David Ebert, Purdue University
	Chris Gilpin, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

You are invited to "Visualization Forum: Enabling Science Discoveries through Visual Exploration". This forum, held on Sunday, October 28, from 1-5:30 PM in the Regency F Ballroom, provides an opportunity to listen to and communicate with invited scientists from a broad variety of disciplines. These invited scientists participated in a workshop entitled, "Enabling Science Discoveries through Visual Exploration", held at the National Science Foundation in September. This workshop had three overarching themes: grand challenge science, impediments to knowledge discovery, and designing sustainable models for integrating visualization and data analysis into the science pipeline. This forum, co-located with the IEEE Visualization 2007 Conference, will provide a unique opportunity to interact with representatives from the science community and exchange ideas for visualizing next generation science.

Agenda

1:00 - 1:30		Opening Remarks and Introductions
1:30 - 2:00		Keynote Remarks by Chris Gilpin (Molecular and Cellular Imaging)
2:00 - 2:30		Scientist Report - Antonio Baptista (Environmental and Biomolecular Systems)
2:30 - 3:00		Scientist Report - Tom Cheatham (Computational Chemistry)
3:00 - 3:30		Scientist Report - Julian Lombardi (Multi-user Virtual 3D applications and Metaverses)
3:30 - 4:00		Scientist Report - Kate Luby-Phelps (Live Cell Imaging)
4:00 - 4:30		Scientist Report - Sonia Lasher-Trapp (Atmospheric Physics)
4:30 - 5:00		Visualization Community Open Discussion and Response
5:00 - 5:30		Open Discussion

Monday, All Day
Knowledge-Assisted Visualization (KAV 2007)

Main Organization Team:	Gerik Scheuermann, Leipzig, Germany (Workshop chair)
	Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California, Davis (Program co-chair)
	Robert van Liere, CWI/Eindhoven University of Technology (Program co-chair)
	Min Chen, Swansea University (Steering committee co-chair)
	Hans Hagen, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (Steering committee co-chair)
Contact Person:	Min Chen, email: m.chen@swansea.ac.uk

Most of the existing visualization techniques and systems were not designed to utilize the knowledge and information derived from the process of scientific visualization or from abstract data analysis. As visual exploration is an inherently iterative process, it is highly desirable to enable more effective visualization by utilizing information about the visualization process itself (e.g., users' chosen visualization parameters and abstractions), and information about the scientific data to be visualized (e.g., high level abstract characterization, and findings). The combination of such information from different visualization processes can also infer new knowledge that can aid data visualization in an intelligent manner if it is stored and organized in a structured fashion.

We begin to see growing efforts to collect and use such information and knowledge, especially when the cost of visualization is high or when the visualization work is collaborative in nature. In addition, information visualization techniques are increasingly used in the context of scientific visualization due to the diverse types of information that need to be looked at for more comprehensive data analysis.

This workshop aims at stimulating the research efforts for knowledge- and information - enabled data visualization by providing a forum for shaping this important and exciting research area. We solicit submissions on work in progress as well as mature results. In particular, the utilization of information and knowledge in producing visually effective data visualization and facilitating efficient visualization processes is the main focus of this workshop.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Metadata visualization
• Visualization enabled by topological information of the data
• Visualization enabled by statistical information of the data
• Visualization enabled by geometric information of the data
• Visualization enabled by semantic information of the data
• Visualization via learning
• Visualization via shared knowledge in a collaborative setting
• Knowledge representation for visualization

The workshop is a full-day event held in conjunction with the IEEE Visualization 2007 Conference. Interested participants are asked to submit short papers (limited to 2 pages), which will be reviewed by an international program committee (IPC). The selected contributions will be presented at the workshop in a very interactive fashion with an extended Q & A session led by experienced researchers from a steering committee of the workshop. A number of participants will be invited to make a full submission for a publication in a special issue of a journal or a book after the workshop. The selection for full submission will be based on the quality of both the extended abstract and the oral presentation in the workshop.

Website: http://kav.swansea.ac.uk

Monday, All Day
VizSec: Visualization for Computer Security

Organizers:	John Goodall, Secure Decisions
	Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California
	Gregory Conti, United States Military Academy
Contact Person:	John Goodall, email: JohnG <at> SecureDecisions <dot> com

The VizSEC 2007 Workshop on Visualization for Computer Security will provide a forum for new research in visualization for computer security. Participants are requested to submit full papers by September 15, 2007. Accepted papers will be published in an edited book by Springer after the workshop. Please see the website for details.

Networked computers are increasingly ubiquitous, and they are subject to attack, misuse, and abuse. Every effort is being made by organizations and individuals to build and maintain trustworthy computing systems. Traditional, signature-based and statistical methods are limited in their capability to cope with the large, evolving data and the dynamic nature of Internet. In many applications, visualization proves very effective to understand large high-dimensional data. Thus, there is a growing interest in the development of visualization methods as alternative or complementary solutions to the pressing cyber security problems.

As a result of previous VizSEC workshops, we have seen both the application of existing visualization techniques to security problems and the development of novel security visualization approaches. However, while security visualization research has addressed the development of applications there has only been limited coverage of user needs and designing visualization to support those needs. To address this shortcoming, the theme of this year's workshop will be on applying user-centered design to VizSEC research, focusing on integrating users' needs, visualization design, and evaluation. This year's workshop will be an incubator for new ideas related to security visualization, a forum for garnering feedback from peers, and a place to identify and meet potential collaborators.

We solicit papers that report results on visualization techniques and systems in solving all aspects of cyber security problems. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Visualization of Internet routing for security
• Visualization of packet traces and network flows for security
• Visualization of security vulnerabilities and attack paths
• Visualization of intrusion detection alerts
• Visualization of application processes for security
• Visualization for forensic analysis
• Visualization for correlating events
• Visualization for computer network defense training
• Visualization for offensive information operations
• Visualization for feature selection
• Visualization for detecting anomalous activity
• Deployment and field testing of VizSEC systems
• Evaluation and user testing of VizSEC systems
• User and design requirements for VizSEC systems
• Lessons learned from VizSEC systems development and deployment

The workshop is a full-day event held in conjunction with the IEEE Visualization 2007 and InfoVis 2007 Conferences. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published in an edited book by Springer after the workshop.

For more information, please see: http://vizsec.org/workshop2007/.