Emmanuel Pietriga

• PhD, HDR
• Senior Researcher at National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control

Spreadsheet programs for interactive surfaces have limited manipulations capabilities and are often frustrating to use. One key reason is that the spreadsheet grid creates a layer that intercepts most user input events, making it difficult to reach the cell values that lie underneath. We conduct an analysis of commercial spreadsheet programs and an...

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have limited display size and input capabilities that make a variety of tasks challenging. Coupling the mobile device with Augmented Reality eyewear such as smartglasses can help address some of these challenges. In the specific context of digital content annotation tasks, this combination has the pote...

We present the design and evaluation of HyperStorylines, a technique that generalizes Storylines to visualize the evolution of relationships involving multiple types of entities such as, for example, people, locations, and companies. Datasets which describe such multi-entity relationships are often modeled as hypergraphs, that can be difficult to v...

Meaningful information about an RDF resource can be obtained not only by looking at its properties, but by putting it in the broader context of similar resources. Classic navigation paradigms on the Web of Data that employ a follow-your-nose strategy fail to provide such context, and put strong emphasis on first-level properties, forcing users to d...

Expressive design environments enable visualization designers not only to specify chart types and visual mappings, but also to customize individual graphical marks, as they would in a vector graphics drawing tool. Prior work has mainly investigated how to support the expressive design of a wide range of charts generated from tabular data: bar chart...

When editing or reviewing a document, people directly overlay ink marks on content. For instance, they underline words, or circle elements in a fgure. These overlay marks often accompany in-context annotations in the form of handwritten footnotes and marginalia. People tend to put annotations close to the content that elicited them, but have to com...

Edges in networks often represent transfer relationships between vertices. When visualizing such networks as node-link diagrams, animated particles flowing along the links can effectively convey this notion of transfer. Variables that govern the motion of particles, their speed in particular, may be used to visually represent edge data attributes....

Observing the relationship between two or more variables over space and time is essential in many domains. For instance, looking, for different countries, at the evolution of both the life expectancy at birth and the fertility rate will give an overview of their demographics. The choice of visual representation for such multivariate data is key to...

Observing the relationship between two or more variables over space and time is essential in many domains. For instance, looking, for different countries, at the evolution of both the life expectancy at birth and the fertility rate will give an overview of their demographics. The choice of visual representation for such multivariate data is key to...

During sensemaking, people annotate insights: underlining sentences in a document or circling regions on a map. They jot down their hypotheses: drawing correlation lines on scatterplots or creating personal legends to track patterns. We present ActiveInk, a system enabling people to seamlessly transition between exploring data and externalizing the...

The Web of Data is growing fast, as exemplified by the evolution of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud over the last ten years. One of the consequences of this growth is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for application developers and end-users to find the datasets that would be relevant to them. Semantic Web search engines, open data catalo...

TouchTokens were introduced recently as a means to design low-cost tangible interfaces. The technique consists in recognizing multi-touch patterns associated with specific tokens, and works on any touch-sensitive surface, with passive tokens that can be made out of any material. TouchTokens have so far been limited to a few basic geometrical shapes...

Multi-scale navigation interfaces were originally designed to enable single users to explore large visual information spaces on desktop workstations. These interfaces can also be quite useful on tabletops. However, their adaptation to co-located multi-user contexts is not straightforward. The literature describes different interfaces, that only off...

Network edge data attributes are usually encoded using color, opacity, stroke thickness and stroke pattern, or some combination thereof. In addition to these static variables, it is also possible to animate dynamic particles flowing along the edges. This opens a larger design space of animated edge textures, featuring additional visual encodings th...

Before-and-after image pairs show how entities in a given region have evolved over a specific period of time. Satellite images are a major source of such data, that capture how natural phenomena or human activity impact a geographical area. These images are used both for data analysis and to illustrate the resulting findings to diverse audiences. T...

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation gamma-ray observatory. CTA will incorporate about 100 imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) at a southern site, and about 20 in the north. Previous IACT experiments have used up to five telescopes. Subsequently, the design of a graphical user interface (GUI) for the operator of C...

Ontology alignment is an area of active research where many algorithms and approaches are being developed. Their performance is usually evaluated by comparing the produced alignments to a reference alignment in terms of precision, recall and F-measure. These measures, however, only provide an overall assessment of the quality of the alignments, but...

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1963/paper496.pdf

GIS software applications and other mapping tools enable users to correlate data from multiple layers and gain insight from the resulting visualizations. However, most of these applications only feature basic, monolithic layer compositing techniques. These techniques do not always support users effectively in their tasks, as we observed during inte...

TouchTokens are passive tokens that can be recognized on any capacitive surface based on the spatial configuration of the fingers that hold them. However, interaction with these tokens is confined to the basic two-state model of touch interaction as the system only knows the tokens' position and cannot detect tokens that are not touched. We increas...

Linked Data promises to serve as a disruptor of traditional approaches to data management and use, promoting the push from the traditional Web of documents to a Web of data. The ability for data consumers to adopt a follow your nose approach, traversing links defined within a dataset or across independently-curated datasets, is an essential feature...

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a planned gamma-ray observatory. CTA will incorporate about 100 imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) at a Southern site, and about 20 in the North. Previous IACT experiments have used up to five telescopes. Subsequently, the design of a graphical user interface (GUI) for the operator of CTA involve...

Ultra-high-resolution wall displays feature a very high pixel density over a large physical surface, which makes them well-suited to the collaborative, exploratory visualization of large datasets. We introduce FITS-OW, an application designed for such wall displays, that enables astronomers to navigate in large collections of FITS images, query ast...

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a planned gamma-ray observatory. CTA will incorporate about 100 imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) at a Southern site, and about 20 in the North. Previous IACT experiments have used up to five telescopes. Subsequently, the design of a graphical user interface (GUI) for the operator of CTA involve...

TouchTokens make it possible to easily build interfaces that combine tangible and gestural input using passive tokens and a regular multi-touch surface. The tokens constrain users' grasp, and thus, the relative spatial configuration of fingers on the surface, theoretically making it possible to design algorithms that can recognize the resulting tou...

We present WallTweet, a tweet visualization designed for wall displays and aimed at improving the situation awareness of users monitoring a crisis event utilizing tweets. Tweets are an important source of information during large-scale events, like tornados or terrorist attacks. Citizens in affected areas are often direct witnesses of the situation...

Drag-and-drop has become ubiquitous, both on desktop computers and touch-sensitive surfaces. It is used to move and edit the geometry of elements in graphics editors, to adjust parameters using controllers such as sliders, or to manage views (e.g., moving and resizing windows, panning maps). Reverting changes made via a drag-and-drop usually entail...

Ultra-high resolution wall-sized displays ("ultra-walls") are effective for presenting large datasets, but their size and resolutionmake traditional pointing techniques inadequate for precision pointing.We study mid-air pointing techniques that can be combined with other, domain-specific interactions.We first explore the limits of existing single-m...

Geovisualization applications typically organize data into layers. These layers hold different types of geographical features, describe different characteristics of the same features, or represent those features at different points in time. Layers can be composited in various ways, most often employing a juxtaposition or superimposition strategy, t...

Article dans le magazine Bits de ciencia, publiée par l'Université du Chili.

The Atacama Large Millimeter /submillimeter Array (ALMA) will be a unique research instrument composed of at least 66 reconfigurable high-precision antennas, located at the Chajnantor plain in the Chilean Andes at an elevation of 5000 m. The observatory has another office located in Santiago of Chile, 1600 km from the Chajnantor plain. In the Ataca...

The ALMA radio-telescope’s operations depend on the availability of high-level, easy-to-understand status information about all of its components. The ALMA Dashboard aims at providing an all-in-one-place near-real-time overview of the observatory’s key elements and figures to both line and senior management. The Dashboard covers a wide range of ele...

Millions of people go to the Web to search for geographical itineraries. Inspecting those map itineraries remains tedious because they seldom fit on screen, requiring much panning & zooming to see details. Focus+context techniques address this problem by displaying routes at a scale that allows them to fully fit on screen: users see the entire rout...

Designing visualizations of dynamic networks is challenging, both because the data sets tend to be complex and because the tasks associated with them are often cognitively demand- ing. We introduce the Matrix Cube, a novel visual representation and navigation model for dynamic networks, inspired by the way people comprehend and manipulate physical...

Identifying, tracking and understanding changes in dynamic networks are complex and cognitively demanding tasks. We present GraphDiaries, a visual interface designed to improve support for these tasks in any node-link based graph visualization system. GraphDiaries relies on animated transitions that highlight changes in the network between time ste...

The Power-up Button is a physical button that combines pressure and proximity sensing to enable gestural interaction with one thumb. Combined with a gesture recognizer that takes the hand's anatomy into account, the Power-up Button can recognize six different mid-air gestures performed on the side of a mobile device. This gives it, for instance, en...

Complex 3D virtual scenes such as CAD models of airplanes and representations of the human body are notoriously hard to visualize. Those models are made of many parts, pieces and layers of varying size, that partially occlude or even fully surround one another. We introduce Gimlenses, a multi-view, detail-in-context visualization technique that ena...

Most tools for visualizing Semantic Web data structure the representation according to the concept definitions and interrelations that constitute the ontology's vocabulary. Instances are often treated as somewhat peripheral information, when considered at all. The visualization of instance-level data poses different but significant challenges as in...

Virtual navigation on a mobile touchscreen is usually performed using finger gestures: drag and flick to scroll or pan, pinch to zoom. While easy to learn and perform, these gestures cause significant occlusion of the display. They also require users to explicitly switch between navigation mode and edit mode to either change the viewport's position...

Rich interaction with high-resolution wall displays is not limited to remotely pointing at targets. Other relevant types of interaction include virtual navigation, text entry, and direct manipulation of control widgets. However, most techniques for remotely acquiring targets with high precision have studied remote pointing in isolation, focusing on...

We present GraphDiaries, an interface for temporal navigation in dynamic networks with changing topology. Navigation in time is necessary for the exploration of single network states at different points in time and to explore higher level changes over periods of time. GraphDiaries enhances conventional node link diagrams with staged animated transi...

Focus+context lens-based techniques smoothly integrate two levels of detail using spatial distortion to connect the magnified region and the context. Distortion guarantees visual continuity, but causes problems of interpretation and focus targeting, partly due to the fact that most techniques are based on statically-defined, regular lens shapes, th...

The article describes the ALMA Operations Monitoring and Control (OMC) software and its next generation user interfaces, used by operators and astronomers to monitor and control the observing facility. These user interfaces bring state-of-the-art Human Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques to the ALMA Control Room: map visualisation, semantic zoomi...

The ALMA radio-telescope, currently under construction in northern Chile, is a very advanced instrument that presents numerous challenges. From a software perspective, one critical issue is the design of graphical user interfaces for operations monitoring and control that scale to the complexity of the system and to the massive amounts of data user...

Les récentes avancées en matière d'acquisition, stockage et traitement des données ont résulté en une augmentation spectaculaire de la quantité d'information collectée et analysée, et ce dans de nombreux domaines : disciplines scientifiques, industrie, commerce, bibliothèques numériques, données mises à disposition du public par des organismes gouv...

Using tiled monitors to build wall-sized displays has multiple advantages: higher pixel density, simpler setup and easier calibration. However, the resulting display walls suffer from the visual discontinuity caused by the bezels that frame each monitor. To avoid introducing distortion, the image has to be rendered as if some pixels were drawn behi...

In graphical user interfaces, direct manipulation consists in incremental actions that should be reversible. Typical examples include manipulating geometrical shapes in a vector graphics editor, navigating a document using a scrollbar, or moving and resizing windows on the desktop. As in many such cases, there will not be any mechanism to undo them...

The WILD (wall-sized interaction with large datasets) room serves as a testbed for exploring the next generation of interactive systems by distributing interaction across diverse computing devices, enabling multiple users to easily and seamlessly create, share, and manipulate digital content. The featured Web extra is a video of Michel Beaudouin-La...

Visual representations of time-series are useful for tasks such as identifying trends, patterns and anomalies in the data. Many techniques have been devised to make these visual representations more scalable, enabling the simultaneous display of multiple variables, as well as the multi-scale display of time-series of very high resolution or that sp...

Research on cluster-driven wall displays has mostly focused on techniques for parallel rendering of complex 3D models. There has been comparatively little research effort dedicated to other types of graphics and to the software engineering issues that arise when prototyping novel interaction techniques or developing full-featured applications for s...

The operators of the ALMA Observatory will monitor and control more than 50 mm/submm radio antennas and their associated instrumentation from an operations site that is separated from this hardware by 35-50 km. Software that enables them to identify trouble spots and react to failures quickly in this environment will be critical to the safe and eff...

Very-high-resolution wall-sized displays offer new opportunities for interacting with large data sets. While pointing on this type of display has been studied extensively, higherlevel, more complex tasks such as pan-zoom navigation have received little attention. It thus remains unclear which techniques are best suited to perform multiscale navigat...

Ultra-high-resolution wall displays have proven useful for displaying large quantities of information, but lack appropriate interaction techniques to manipulate the data efficiently. We explore the limits of existing modeless remote pointing techniques, originally designed for lower resolution displays, and show that they do not support high-precis...

Most Semantic Web data visualization tools structure the representation according to the concept definitions and interrelations that constitute the ontology's vocabulary. Instances are often treated as somewhat peripheral information, when considered at all. These instances, that populate ontologies, represent an essential part of any knowledge bas...

Focus+context interaction techniques based on the metaphor of lenses are used to navigate and interact with objects in large information spaces. They provide in-place magnification of a region of the display without requiring users to zoom into the representation and consequently lose context. In order to avoid occlusion of its immediate surroundin...

Focus+context interfaces provide in-place magnification of a region of the display, smoothly integrating the focus of attention into its surroundings. Two representations of the data exist simultaneously at two different scales, providing an alternative to classical pan & zoom for navigating multi-scale interfaces. For many practical applications h...

We present DynaSpot, a new technique for acquiring targets based on the area cursor. DynaSpot couples the cursor's activation area with its speed, behaving like a point cursor at low speed or when motionless. This technique minimizes visual distraction and allows pointing anywhere in empty space without requiring an explicit mode switch, thus enabl...

Applications supporting navigation in large networks are used every days by millions of people. They include road map navigators, flight route visualization systems, and network visualization systems using node-link diagrams. These applications currently provide generic interaction methods for navigation: pan-and-zoom and sometimes bird's eye views...

Contrairement aux langages du web original tel que HTML, les langages du web sé-mantique ne définissent pas de modèle de présentation des données, celles-ci étant décrites et structurées de manière à faciliter leur interprétation et leur manipulation par des agents lo-giciels. Ces données sont cependant en partie créées et manipulées par différente...

Focus+context techniques such as fisheye lenses are used to navigate and manipulate objects in multi-scale worlds. They provide in-place magnification of a region without requiring users to zoom the whole representation and consequently lose context. Their adoption is however hindered by usability problems mostly due to the nature of the transition...

A number of experimental studies based on domain-specific tasks have evaluated the efficiency of navigation techniques for searching multi-scale worlds. The discrepancies among their results call for a more generic framework similar in spirit to Fitts' reciprocal pointing task, but adapted to a task that significantly differs from pure pointing. We...

Semantic Web browsers and other tools aimed at displaying RDF data to end users are all concerned with the same problem: presenting content primarily intended for machine consumption in a human-readable way. Their solutions differ but in the end address the same two high-level issues, no matter the underlying representation paradigm: specifying (i)...

Visual paradigms such as node-link diagrams are well suited to the representation of Semantic Web data encoded with the Resource Description Framework (RDF), whose data model can be seen as a directed labeled graph. However, these representations are not fully satisfying: diagrams can quickly become big and over-cluttered, making them hard to under...

As the number, richness and diversity of biological sources grow, scientists are increasingly confronted with the problem of selecting appropriate sources and tools. To address this problem, we have designed BioGuidel, a user-centric framework that helps scientists choose sources and tools according to their preferences and strategy, by specifying...

After a brief introduction to the Circus programming language, we present a simple type set to model XML structures. We then describe a transformation that takes a mail as input and produces a reply, showing how subtyping is used in order to refine the type control and specialize the transformation. Conclusions are drawn both on our (easy to use bu...

RDF models describe web resources using subject-predicate-object triples. Combined together, these triples form a graph structure, which cannot be easily conveyed by textual syntaxes such as RDF/XML, Notation 3 or N-Triple because of their one-dimensional nature. Visual editors such as IsaViz and RDF Author represent models as editable node-link di...

After a brief introduction to the Circus programming language, we present a simple type set to model XML structures. We then describe a transformation that takes a mail as input and produces a reply, showing how subtyping is used in order to refine the type control and specialize the transformation. Conclusions are drawn both on our (easy to use bu...

The adoption of XML in a wide variety of domains for the representation of structured documents and data has made the processing of World Wide Web documents easier, by offering generic solutions for parsing and manipulating them. These operations are often achieved through document structure and content transformations, and play a key role in the d...

The domain of XML transformations is becoming more and more important as a result of the increasing number of applications adopting XML as their format for data exchange or representation. Most of the existing solutions for expressing XML transformations are textual languages, such as XSLT or DOM combined with a general-purpose programming language...

The ever-growing amount of heterogeneous data exchanged via the Internet, combined with the popularity of XML, makes structured document transformations an increasingly important application domain. Most of the existing solutions for expressing XML transformations are textual languages, such as XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations)...

This formal study proposes a transformational approach to the definition of general purpose visual languages based on hierarchical structures, addressing more specifically DTD visualization as its application area. We show that such visual languages can be constructed through progressive refinement of a syntax based on nested/juxtaposed rectangles....