Wolfgang Aigner

St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences · Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies

The research communities studying visualization and sonification for data display and analysis share exceptionally similar goals, essentially making data of any kind interpretable to humans. One community does so by using visual representations of data, and the other community employs auditory (non‐speech) representations of data. While the two com...

The importance of temporal aspects in data analysis and visualization is paramount across various disciplines. Due to the unique characteristics of time, multi-scale temporal analysis, comparisons over different periods, and the examination of variable correlations pose particular challenges for visualization methods. Currently, existing grammars f...

One of the commonly used visualization techniques for multivariate data is the parallel coordinates plot. It provides users with a visual overview of multivariate data and the possibility to interactively explore it. While pattern recognition is a strength of the human visual system, it is also a strength of the auditory system. Inspired by the int...

This chapter briefly summarizes the content of the book and describes practical concerns of visualizing time-oriented data in real-world data settings. Visual analytics is briefly outlined as a modern approach that combines visualization, interaction, and computational analysis more tightly to facilitate data analysis activities better. Finally, re...

This chapter describes how researchers and practitioners can be guided in making informed decisions when selecting visualization techniques for time and time-oriented data. The TimeViz Browser is introduced and a general conceptual model for guided search for visualization techniques is outlined.

This chapter takes a look back in time and presents a selection of historical visual representations of time-oriented data. The representation of time in the arts is a second aspect covered in this chapter.

This chapter is concerned with computational methods to support the analysis of time-oriented data. A general overview of temporal data analysis is provided and specific application examples will be used for demonstration.

This chapter investigates in detail the characteristics of time and time-oriented data. Design aspects for modeling time and time-oriented data are introduced and discussed using examples. The chapter also sheds some light on data quality.

This chapter explains why involving the human is important when visually analyzing time and time-oriented data. Some general assertions will be made and basic interaction concepts introduced. The chapter also covers advanced interaction methods and goes beyond mouse and keyboard interaction.

Many different types of data are related to time. Meteorological data, financial data, census data, medical data, simulation data, news articles, photo collections, or project plans, to name only a few examples, all contain temporal information. In theory, because all these data are time-oriented, they should be representable with one and the same...

The aim of visualization is to support people in dealing with large and complex information structures, to make these structures more comprehensible, facilitate exploration, and enable knowledge discovery. However, users often have problems reading and interpreting data from visualizations, in particular when they experience them for the first time...

This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combine...

Integrating visualization onboarding methods into visual analytics tools presents challenges for designers and developers. These challenges include the varying complexity of visualization techniques, data types, and users’ expertise levels. Selecting and integrating educational theories, ensuring the completeness and clarity of onboarding instructi...

Several journalistic abilities are required to derive narratives from data, including the skill to discover and construct compelling stories (data storytelling), employ data-driven techniques to research and analyze information (data literacy), utilize visualization methods effectively (visualization literacy), and approach data with a combination...

Recipients of data stories need a certain visualization literacy level to understand and interpret more elaborate data visualizations correctly. For general audiences, however, visualization literacy levels are known to be relatively low. Therefore, journalists face the challenge that they are either restricted to using very simplistic representati...

Visualization onboarding supports users in reading, interpreting, and extracting information from visual data representations. General-purpose onboarding tools and libraries are applicable for explaining a wide range of graphical user interfaces but cannot handle specific visualization requirements. This paper describes a first step towards develop...

This paper discusses the potential of comics for explaining concepts with and around data visualization. With the increasing spread of visualizations and the democratization of access to visualization tools, we see a growing need for easily approachable resources for learning visualization techniques, applications, design processes, etc. Comics are...

Both sonification and visualization convey information about data by effectively using our human perceptual system, but their ways to transform the data differ. Over the past 30 years, the sonification community has demanded a holistic perspective on data representation, including audio-visual analysis, several times. A design theory of audio-visua...

This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combine...

Comprehending and exploring large and complex data is becoming increasingly important for a diverse population of users in a wide range of application domains. Visualization has proven to be well-suited in supporting this endeavor by tapping into the power of human visual perception. However, non-experts in the field of visual data analysis often h...

Comprehending and exploring large and complex data is becoming increasingly important for users in a wide range of application domains. Still, non-experts in visual data analysis often have problems with correctly reading and interpreting information from visualizations that are new to them. To support novices in learning how to use new digital tec...

The aim of visualization is to support people in dealing with large and complex information structures, to make these structures more comprehensible, facilitate exploration, and enable knowledge discovery. However, users often have problems reading and interpreting data from visualizations, in particular when they experience them for the first time...

The rise of Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical systems has led to an abundance of large amounts of data, particularly in the manufacturing industry. Visualization and visual analytics play essential roles in harnessing this data. They have already been acknowledged as being among the key enabling technologies in the fourth industrial revolution. Howev...

A typical problem in Visual Analytics (VA) is that users are highly trained experts in their application domains, but have mostly no experience in using VA systems. Thus, users often have difficulties interpreting and working with visual representations. To overcome these problems, user assistance can be incorporated into VA systems to guide expert...

A typical problem in Visual Analytics is that users are highly trained experts in their application domains, but have mostly no experience in using VA systems. Thus, users often have difficulties interpreting and working with visual representations. To overcome these problems, user assistance can be incorporated into VA systems to guide experts thr...

This chapter surveys the space of three-dimensional (3D) mobile visualizations, that is, 3D abstract or spatial data on mobile 2D displays or 3D immersive displays. As a playful “case study” a scenario from the film Aliens is used, where the marines are overrun by aliens in the ceiling, as their mobile visualization device fails to show them the he...

Comprehending and exploring large and complex data is becoming increasingly important for a diverse population of users in a wide range of application domains. Visualization has proven to be well-suited in supporting this endeavor by tapping into the power of human visual perception. However, non-experts in the field of visual analysis often have d...

Both sonification and visualization convey information about data by effectively using our human perceptual system, but their ways to transform the data could not be more different. The sonification community has demanded a holistic perspective on data representation, including audio-visual analysis, several times during the past 30 years. A design...

Many museums offer mobile apps to extend the brief descriptions of physical exhibits. However, these apps often reproduce on-site content, are not location-aware, or demand several user interactions to view the content. Therefore, we propose using visitors’ mobile devices to extend static information with time-oriented, situated information visuali...

Data literacy has become a critical skill to deal with the complexities of the information-driven society of the 21st century. At the same time, data visualization has long escaped the boundaries of science and has become a pervasive - often unrecognized - part of our everyday lives. In this paper, we introduce Diagram Safari, an educational game t...

Clinicians and other analysts working with healthcare data are in need for better support to cope with large and complex data. While an increasing number of visual analytics environments integrates explicit domain knowledge as a means to deliver a precise representation of the available data, theoretical work so far has focused on the role of knowl...

The aim of visualization is to support humans in dealing with large and complex information structures, to make these structures more comprehensible, facilitate exploration, and enable knowledge dis- covery. However, users often have problems reading and interpreting data from visualizations, in particular when they experience them for the first ti...

Journalists need visual interfaces that cater to the exploratory nature of their investigative activities. In this paper, we report on a four‐year design study with data journalists. The main result is netflower, a visual exploration tool that supports journalists in investigating quantitative flows in dynamic network data for story‐finding. The vi...

Visualizing time series in a dense spatial context such as a geographical map is a challenging task, which requires careful balance between the amount of depicted data and perceptual precision. Horizon graphs are a well-known technique for compactly representing time series data. They provide fine details while simultaneously giving an overview of...

This is the presentation from IEEEVIS 2018 according to the TCVG paper with the title: "KAVAGait: Knowledge-Assisted Visual Analytics for Clinical Gait Analysis".

The assignment of labels to data instances is a fundamental prerequisite for many machine learning tasks. Moreover, labeling is a frequently applied process in visual interactive analysis approaches and visual analytics. However, the strategies for creating labels usually differ between these two fields. This raises the question whether synergies b...

In the next 20 years, significant changes in air traffic control are planned (SESAR, 2015). Next to an increase in air traffic, reduction in delays and improvement of safety, 4D trajectories will ensure flights on the most direct route to the destination airport. Within the research project VAST (Virtual Airspace and Tower), the team wants to explo...

In many museums it is still common that visitors have to read static texts from boards to gain information about the exhibits. In times where almost every visitor carries a smartphone in their pocket, these devices could be utilized for a more personalized and interactive visitor experience. In this paper we present a design study for a “Bring your...

In 2014, more than 10 million people in the US were affected by an ambulatory disability. Thus, gait rehabilitation is a crucial part of health care systems. The quantification of human locomotion enables clinicians to describe and analyze a patient's gait performance in detail and allows them to base clinical decisions on objective data. These ass...

While second screen scenarios – that is, simultaneously using a phone, tablet or laptop while watching TV or a recorded broadcast - are finding their ways into the homes of millions of people, our understanding of how to properly design them is still very limited. We envision this design space and investigate how interactive data visualization can...

Visual analytics intertwines interactive visual interfaces with automated data analysis methods in order to support humans in data analysis. How visual analytics can leverage explicit knowledge from domain experts was investigated in the basic research project KAVA-Time. Within its scope, a theoretical model for integrating the users' knowledge int...

This chapter starts by providing some background in behavior-based malware analysis. Subsequently, it introduces VA and its main components based on the knowledge generation model for VA (Sacha et al., 2014). Then, it demonstrates the applicability of VA in in this subfield of software security with three projects that illustrate practical experien...

Most laypersons who reanimate for the first time do it inappropriately. Until now the only way to review the ongoing reanimation was verbal feedback by the dispatcher on the phone, who has only limited resources in order to review the reanimation process. To overcome this issue, we designed and implemented LifeStream, a system using current smartph...

Malicious software, short "malware", refers to software programs that are designed to cause damage or to perform unwanted actions on the infected computer system. Behavior-based analysis of malware typically utilizes tools that produce lengthy traces of observed events, which have to be analyzed manually or by means of individual scripts. Due to th...

The increasing number of malicious software (malware) requires domain experts to shift their analysis process towards more individualized approaches to acquire more information about unknown malware samples. KAMAS is a knowledge-assisted visual analytics prototype for behavioral malware analysis. It allows IT-security experts to categorize and stor...

Almost every visitor brings their own mobile device (e.g., smartphone or tablet) to the museum. Although, many museums include interactive exhibits (e.g., multi-touch tables), the visitors’ own devices are rarely used as part of a device ecology. Currently, there is no suitable infrastructure to seamlessly link different devices in museums. Our app...

Opinion polls are omnipresent in broadcasting concepts and play an important role in live TV settings. However, involving the audience more intensively in both, the studio as well as at home in front of the television sets, and bringing them together using real-time interaction is still an open challenge. To tackle this aspect, we present LiveVis –...

Since decades, Air Traffic Control Officers (ATCOs) are working with 2D representations of the airspace (RADAR). Based on the Single European Sky Air traffic management Research (SESAR) [24], some planned innovations will change the way, air traffic will be handled in the future. Therefore, the paper first presents a requirements analysis in order...

The ever increasing number of malicious software (malware) requires domain experts to shift their analysis process towards more individualized approaches to acquire more information about presently unknown malware samples. KAMAS is a knowledge-assisted visual analytics prototype for behavioral malware analysis, which allows IT-security experts to c...

Malicious software, short malware, refers to software programs that are designed to cause damage or to perform unwanted actions on the infected computer system. The behavior-based analysis of malware typically utilizes tools that produce lengthy traces of observed events, which have to be analyzed manually or by means of individual scripts. Due to...

Mobile devices are more and more used in parallel, esp. in the field of TV viewing as second screen devices. Such scenarios aim to enhance the viewers' user experience while watching TV. We designed and implemented a second screen prototype intended to be used in parallel to watching a TV documentary. It allows to interactively explore a combinatio...

Multivariate, tabular data is one of the most common data structures used in many different domains. Over time, tables can undergo changes in both structure and content, which results in multiple versions of the same table. A challenging task when working with such derived tables is to understand what exactly has changed between versions in terms o...

In 2014, more than 10 million people in the US were affected by an ambulatory disability. Thus, gait rehabilitation is a crucial part of health care systems. The quantification of human locomotion enables clinicians to describe and analyze a patient's gait performance in detail and allows them to base clinical decisions on objective data. These ass...

Publications play a central role in presenting the outcome of scientific research but are typically presented as textual lists, whereas related work in visualization of publication focuses on exploration – not presentation. To bridge this gap, we conducted a design study of an interactive visual representation of publication data in a BibTeX file....

Visual Analytics is a field of computer science that deals with methods to perform data analysis using both computer-based methods and human judgment facilitated by direct interaction with visual representations of data. Electronic health record systems that apply Visual Analytics methods have the potential to provide healthcare stakeholders with m...

IT-security experts engage in behavior-based malware analysis in order to learn about previously unknown samples of malicious software (malware) or malware families. For this, they need to find and categorize suspicious patterns from large collections of execution traces. Currently available systems do not meet the analysts’ needs which are describ...

IT-security experts engage in behavior-based malware analysis in order to learn about previously unknown samples of malicious software (malware) or malware families. For this, they need to find and categorize suspicious patterns from large collections of execution traces. Currently available systems do not meet the analysts' needs described as: vis...