Catherine Plaisant

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Computer Science

People use recommender systems to improve their decisions; for example, item recommender systems help them find films to watch or books to buy. Despite the ubiquity of item recommender systems, they can be improved by giving users greater transparency and control. This article develops and assesses interactive strategies for transparency and contro...

Visual tools that analyze events can reveal patterns, interesting rarities, and troubling anomalies in a vast array of data sets. New research and the integration of statistical data-mining methods is required to address data quality, scalability, theoretical grounding, and meaningful presentations.

Recommendation applications can guide users in making important life choices by referring to the activities of similar peers. For example, students making academic plans may learn from the data of similar students, while patients and their physicians may explore data from similar patients to select the best treatment. Selecting an appropriate peer...

Visualization contributes to a variety of tasks, from reviewing individual patient records to helping researchers assess data quality, find patients of interest, review temporal patterns and anomalies or understand differences between cohorts. We review some of visualization techniques developed at the University of Maryland. This article is protec...

Wrong-patient errors from inadvertent menu selections while using computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems could have fatal consequences. This study investigated whether the manipulation of CPOE interface design could improve healthcare providers’ ability to recognize patient selection errors and also decrease the time to error recognition....

In its 35 years, the CHI Community's remarkable research success has enabled an astonishing worldwide cultural transformation. CHI research on graphical user interfaces, touchscreens, hypertext, mobile devices, and social media have dramatically changed family/friend relationships, business, medical care, education, and much more. Many of the chang...

People often seek examples of similar individuals to guide their own life choices. For example, students making academic plans refer to friends; patients refer to acquaintances with similar conditions, physicians mention past cases seen in their practice. How would they want to search for similar people in databases? We discuss the challenge of fin...

Purpose/Objective(s) Skeletal-related events (SREs), which include radiation to the bone (RtB), can occur among patients with bone metastasis (BM). There is a recognized potential for misclassification of RtB when using claims data. We compared alternative measures of RtB to better understand their impact on SRE prevalence and SRE-related mortality...

The era of “big data” promises more information for health practitioners, patients, researchers, and policy makers. For big data resources to be more than larger haystacks in which to find precious needles, stakeholders will have to aim higher than increasing computing power and producing faster, nimbler machines. We will have to develop tools for...

Animations are commonplace in today's user interfaces. From bouncing icons that catch attention, to transitions helping with orientation, to tutorials, animations can serve numerous purposes. We revisit Baecker and Small's pioneering work Animation at the Interface, 25 years later. We reviewed academic publications and commercial systems, and inter...

Beginning the analysis of new data is often difficult as modern datasets can be overwhelmingly large. With visual analytics in particular, displays of large datasets quickly become crowded and unclear. Through observing the practices of analysts working with the event sequence visualization tool EventFlow, we identified three techniques to reduce i...

Cohort comparison studies have traditionally been hypothesis driven and conducted in carefully controlled environments (such as clinical trials). Given two groups of event sequence data, researchers test a single hypothesis (e.g., does the group taking Medication A exhibit more deaths than the group taking Medication B?). Recently, however, researc...

The growing volume and variety of data presents both opportunities and challenges for visual analytics. Addressing these challenges is needed for big data to provide valuable insights and novel solutions for business, security, social media, and healthcare. In the case of temporal event sequence analytics it is the number of events in the data and...

Background: Advanced computing capabilities and novel visual analytics tools now allow us to move beyond the traditional cross-sectional summaries to analyze longitudinal prescription patterns and the impact of study design decisions. For example, design decisions regarding gaps and overlaps in prescription fill data are necessary for measuring ad...

The growing volumes of time-stamped data available from sensors, social media sources, Web logs, and medical histories present remarkable opportunities for researchers and policy analysts. Although big data resources can provide valuable insights to help us understand complex systems and lead to better decisions for business, national security, cyb...

Finding the differences and similarities between two datasets is a common analytics task. With temporal event sequence data, this task is complex because of the many ways single events and event sequences can differ between the two datasets (or cohorts) of records: the structure of the event sequences (e.g., event order, co-occurring events, or eve...

Analyzing important changes to massive transportation datasets like national bottleneck statistics, passenger data for domestic flights, airline maintenance budgets, or even publication data from the Transportation Research Record can be extremely complex. These types of datasets are often grouped by attributes in a tree structure hierarchy. The pa...

Objective: The primary objective was to evaluate time, number of interface actions, and accuracy on medication reconciliation tasks using a novel user interface (Twinlist, which lays out the medications in five columns based on similarity and uses animation to introduce the grouping - www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/sharp/twinlist) compared to a Control inter...

Medical treatments carry unique benefits and risks which patients must understand in order to decide which option is best for them. Prior research has demonstrated that patients are ill-equipped to understand the statistical information presented to them through standard decision aids. We describe a prototype decision aid, TreatmentExplorer, which...

Wrong patient selection errors are a major issue for patient safety; from ordering medication to performing surgery, the stakes are high. Widespread adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) systems makes patient selection using a computer screen a frequent task for clinicians. Careful design of the use...

Visualization has proven to be a useful tool for understanding network structures. Yet the dynamic nature of social media networks requires powerful visualization techniques that go beyond static network diagrams. To provide strong temporal network visualization tools, designers need to understand what tasks the users have to accomplish. This paper...

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have emerged as a cost-effective data source for conducting medical research. The difficulty in using EHRs for research purposes, however, is that both patient selection and record analysis must be conducted across very large, and typically very noisy datasets. Our previous work introduced EventFlow, a visualization...

To analyze data such as the US Federal Budget or characteristics of the student population of a University it is common to look for changes over time. This task can be made easier and more fruitful if the analysis is performed by grouping by attributes, such as by Agencies, Bureaus and Accounts for the Budget, or Ethnicity, Gender and Major in a Un...

Transportation data sets of all kinds are hierarchical in nature and therefore are easily represented in tree structures. Visually comparing the changes in these hierarchical data sets over time can be extremely difficult, even when the trees are relatively small. TreeVersity is a novel interactive visualization that allows users to detect and anal...

Medication reconciliation is an important and complex task for which careful user interface design has the potential to help reduce errors and improve quality of care. In this paper we focus on the hospital discharge scenario and first describe a novel interface called Twinlist. Twinlist illustrates the novel use of spatial layout combined with mul...

Risk communication is a major challenge in productive patient-physician communication. Patient decision making responsibilities come with an implicit assumption that patients are sufficiently educated and confident in their abilities to make decisions about their care based on evidence based treatment recommendations. Attempts to improve health lit...

Evaluation of software can take many forms ranging from algorithm correctness and performance to evaluations that focus on the value to the end user. This article presents a discussion of the development of an evaluation methodology for visual analytics environments. The Visual Analytics Science and Technology Challenge was created as a community e...

Demo Hour highlights new prototypes and projects that exemplify innovation and novel forms of interaction. Audrey Desjardins, Editor

Visualization and visual analytics re-searchers can contribute substantial technological advances to support the reliable, effective, safe, and validated systems required for personal health, clinical healthcare, and public health policy-making. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/KLlStIfGUZQ is a video showing how Oracle Health Sciences Institute is...

In our burgeoning world of ubiquitous sensors and affordable data storage, records of timestamped events are being produced across nearly every domain of personal and professional computing. The resulting data surge has created an overarching need to search these records for meaningful patterns of events. This paper reports on a two-part user study...

We describe the evolution of the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge from its origin in 2006 to present (2012). The VAST Challenge has provided an opportunity for visual analytics researchers to test their innovative thoughts on approaching problems in a wide range of subject domains against realistic datasets and problem...

Sequences of events are part of people's life, their travel, hospital visits, even web browsing experiences. Analysing collections of event sequences can be challenging even for skilled computer professionals. We will review a series of visualization techniques developed at the Human-Computer Interaction lab to handle temporal data.

Fig. 1: The EventFlow display including the control panel and legend (left), the aggregated record display (middle), and the individual record display (right). Abstract— Our work on searching point-based event sequences with the Align, Rank, Filter, and Summary concepts produced a powerful tool (Lifelines2) that is being applied in an increasing se...

DiffTree shows the amount of change for each node. The glyph called "the bullet " points up to denote increases, and down for decreases. Nodes that have the same value in both trees are shown as small gray rectangles. The created and removed nodes are highlighted with a thick white or black border respectively. In this example the height of the Bul...

Our project looks at novel user interfaces to facilitate medication reconciliation. We are focusing on the user interface that physicians might use to compare and merge two separate lists of medications. Similarities and differences between the lists need to be identified; decisions need to be made as to which medications should be continued and wh...

Specifying event sequence queries is challenging even for skilled computer professionals familiar with SQL. Most graphical user interfaces for database search use an exact match approach, which is often effective, but near misses may also be of interest. We describe a new similarity search interface, in which users specify a query by simply placing...

Efficient analysis of event sequences and the ability to answer time-related, clinically important questions can accelerate clinical research in several areas such as causality assessments, decision support systems, and retrospective studies. The Clinical Narrative Temporal Reasoning Ontology (CNTRO)-based system is designed for semantically repres...

Visual overviews of tables of numerical and categorical data have been proposed for tables with a single value per cell. This paper addresses the problem of exploring tables whose columns consist of cells that are distributions, e.g. the distributions of movie ratings or trust ratings in recommender systems, age distributions in demographic data, u...

We take a new, scenario based look at evaluation in information visualization. Our seven scenarios, evaluating visual data analysis and reasoning, evaluating user performance, evaluating user experience, evaluating environments and work practices, evaluating communication through visualization, evaluating visualization algorithms, and evaluating co...

In spite of advances in technologies for working with data, analysts still spend an inordinate amount of time diagnosing data quality issues and manipulating data into a usable form. This process of 'data wrangling' often constitutes the most tedious ...

It is common to classify data in hierarchies, they provide a comprehensible way of understanding big amounts of data. From budgets to organizational charts or even the stock market, trees are everywhere and people find them easy to use. However when analysts need to compare two versions of the same tree structure, or two related taxonomies, the tas...

In spite of advances in technologies for working with data, analysts still spend an inordinate amount of time diagnosing data quality issues and manipulating data into a usable form. This process of 'data wrangling' often constitutes the most tedious and time-consuming aspect of analysis. Though data cleaning and integration are longstanding issues...

Information visualization is a powerful tool for analyzing the dynamic nature of social communities. Using Nation of Neighbors community network as a testbed, we propose five principles of implementing temporal visualizations for social networks and present two research prototypes: NodeXL and TempoVis. Three different states are defined in order to...

In this paper, we seek to find a better way of effective task management when a progress bar interrupts user's primary activity. We propose to augment progress bars with user controlled functionalities facilitating the switch to temporary activities. We detail a taxonomy of waiting period contexts and possible temporary tasks, then report on 5 part...

Event sequence analysis is an important task in many domains: medical researchers may study the patterns of transfers within the hospital for quality control; transportation experts may study accident response logs to identify best practices. In many cases they deal with thousands of records. While previous research has focused on searching and bro...

Current electronic health record (EHR) systems facilitate the storage, retrieval, persistence, and sharing of patient data. However, the way physicians interact with EHRs has not changed much. More specifically, support for temporal analysis of a large number of EHRs has been lacking. A number of information visualization techniques have been propo...

Event sequence analysis is an important task in many domains: medical researchers may study the patterns of transfers within the hospital for quality control; transportation experts may study accident response logs to identify best practices. In many cases they deal with thousands of records. While previous research has focused on searching and bro...

150 words unstructured) As the use of electronic health records (EHRs) spreads, interactive query interfaces will assist researchers and clinicians to quickly find historical records that include specific temporal patterns. This paper describes such an interface called LifeLines2, and summarizes how it was applied to a set of clinical problems. Our...

Number of words in abstract, text and references: 4,675. Number of figures: 8 Total effective number of words = 4,675+ (8 * 250) = 6,675 ABSTRACT While traditional safety and incident analysis has mostly focused on incident attributes data, such as the location and time of the incident, there are other aspects in incident response that are temporal...

We take a new, scenario based look at evaluation in information visualization. Our seven scenarios, evaluating visual data analysis and reasoning, evaluating user performance, evaluating user experience, evaluating environments and work practices, evaluating communication through visualization, automated evaluation of visualizations, and evaluating...

Medication errors can result from administration inaccuracies at any point of care and are a major cause for concern. To develop a successful Medication Reconciliation (MR) tool, we believe it necessary to build a Work Domain Ontology (WDO) for the MR process. A WDO defines the explicit, abstract, implementation-independent description of the task...

Researchers have conducted numerous case studies reporting the details on how laboratory test results of patients were missed by the ordering medical providers. Given the importance of timely test results in an outpatient setting, there is limited discussion of electronic versions of test result management tools to help clinicians and medical staff...

The 5^th VAST Challenge consisted of three mini-challenges that involved both intelligence analysis and bioinformatics. Teams could solve one, two or all three mini-challenges and assess the overall situation to enter the Grand Challenge. Mini-challenge one involved text reports about people and events giving information about arms dealer...

Current electronic health record (EHR) systems facilitate the storage, retrieval, persistence, and sharing of patient data. However, the way physicians interact with EHRs has not changed much. More specifically, support for temporal analysis of a large number of EHRs has been lacking. A number of information visualization techniques have been propo...

Developing a detailed requirement analysis facilitates the building of interactive visualization systems that support exploratory analysis of multiple temporal event sequences. We discuss our experiences with collaborators in several domains on how they have used our systems and present a process model for exploratory search as the generalization o...

Interactive information visualization systems rely on widgets to allow users to interact with the data and modify the representation. We define interactive legends as a class of controls combining the visual representation of static legends and interaction mechanisms of widgets. As interactive legends start to appear in popular websites, we categor...

Purpose: This study aims at evaluating the effectiveness of sonification as a mean to provide access to geo-referenced information to users with visual impairments. Method: Thiry-five participants (10 congenitally blind, 10 with acquired blindness and 15 blindfolded sighted) completed four tasks of progressive difficulty. During each task, parti...

Traditional network analysis tools support analysts in study- ing a single network. ManyNets offers these analysts a pow- erful new approach that enables them to work on multiple networks simultaneously. Several thousand networks can be presented as rows in a tabular visualization, and then in- spected, sorted and filtered according to their attrib...

After an overview of visualizations to explore temporal patterns, we will focus on interfaces for discovering temporal event patterns in electronic health records. Specifying event sequence queries is challenging even for skilled computer professionals familiar with SQL. Our novel interactive search strategies allow for aligning records on importan...

Visual overviews of tables of numerical and categorical data have been proposed for tables with a single value per cell. In this paper we address the problem of exploring tables including columns consisting of distributions, e.g. the distributions of movie ratings or trust ratings in recommender systems, age distributions in demographic data, usage...

Informal communications media pose new challenges for information-systems design, but the nature of informal interaction offers new opportunities as well. This paper describes NetLens-E-mail, a system designed to support exploration of the content-actor network in large e-mail collections. Unique features of NetLens-E-mail include close coupling of...

A common task in literary analysis is to study characters in a novel or collection. Automatic entity extraction, text analysis and effective user interfaces facilitate character analysis. Using our interface, called POSvis, the scholar uses word clouds and self-organizing graphs to review vocabulary, to filter by part of speech, and to explore the...

When analyzing thousands of event histories, analysts often want to see the events as an aggregate to detect insights and generate new hypotheses about the data. An analysis tool must emphasize both the prevalence and the temporal ordering of these events. Additionally, the analysis tool must also support flexible comparisons to allow analysts to g...

Abstract—Researchers,in literature need,to compare,several versions,of one,or more,poems,or articles for investigating their historical and,literary significance. Current tools do not adequately,support,their requirements.,We,address,some,of these issues by developing MultiVersioner, a tool designed to interactively analyze multiple documents, each...

In this paper the authors describe the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Symposium contests run in 2006 and 2007 and the VAST 2008 and 2009 challenges. These contests were designed to provide researchers with a better understanding of the tasks and data that face potential end users. Access to these end users is limited due to time con...

Visual analytics (VA) is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. Assessing VA technology's effectiveness is challenging because VA tools combine several disparate components, both low and high level, integrated in complex interactive systems used by analysts, emergency responders, and others. These componen...

The 4^th VAST Challenge centered on a cyber analytics scenario and offered three mini-challenges with datasets of badge and network traffic data, a social network including geospatial information, and security video. Teams could also enter the Grand challenge which combined all three datasets. In this paper, we summarize the dataset, the...

Number of words in abstract, text and references: 6774 Number of figures: 6 Total effective # words = 6,820 + (6 * 250) = 8,274 TRB 2008 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal. 2 ABSTRACT Computers are extremely powerful for data processing, but less adept at handling problems that involve subjective reasoning. People, on the o...

Visual analytics experts realize that one effective way to push the field forward and to develop metrics for measuring the performance of various visual analytics components is to hold an annual competition. The VAST 2008 Challenge is the third year that such a competition was held in conjunction with the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technolog...