“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master” —Milton Glaser

Visual Analytics Science and Application Workshop recap

Posted: February 5th, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: News, Visual Analytics | No Comments »

The Visual Analytics Science and Application Workshop was the first major event on visual analytics in Canada that brought together key thought leaders, scientists, designers, artists, and government and industry representatives together in once place to witness the current work being done in the burgeoning field of VA and to explore future research and collaborative possibilities. The 3 day public (and free) workshop took place from Feb 2 – 4 and was organized by the Canadian Network of Visual Analytic Centres (CNVAC). The first two full-day sessions were held at the Segal Centre at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus while the third day took place at the Peter Wall Centre for Advanced Studies at UBC. This outstanding workshop was a significant step towards solidifying SFU and UBC, led by Brian Fisher, John Dill, and Ronald Rensink, as the locus of VA research in Canada. Many exceptional scholars from the US and Canada, and a few from Europe attended the event, which hosted respected scholars and designers such as Bradford Paley, Dave Ebert, Colin Ware, Ronald Rensink, Pat Hanrahan, and several others. Talks ranged from keynotes by Joe Kielman and Jim Thomas to project demostrations such as JigSaw by John Stasko’s team at Georgia Tech, a range of Microsoft development projects by George Robertson’s team, and IN-SPIRE from PNNL. For a complete list of presentations, visit the Visual Analytics Science and Application Workshop site.


WordPress chosen for blog

Posted: February 2nd, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: News | No Comments »

I’ve decided to go with WordPress for my blog. It was a decision between MoveableType and WordPress. At the end of the day, it came down to the size of the community and the size of the application. WordPress “felt” like it has a slightly larger following and the size of the application download is just 1mb vs. 4mb for MoveableType. Moreover, just as advertised, it installed in under 5 minutes. I’m attending the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies workshop “Visual Analytics – Science and Application” this weekend (Feb 2- 4) in Vancouver. The list of speakers is amazing and a very good networking opportunity for people doing visual analytics research in North America. Visit again for more posts coming up in the next few days.