Danyel Fisher's research while affiliated with Microsoft and other places
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Publications (90)
An overwhelming number of news articles are available every day via the internet. Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to peruse more than a handful; furthermore it is difficult to ascertain an article's social context, i.e., is it popular, what sorts of people are reading it, etc. In this paper, we develop a system to address this problem in the...
Several years of consulting with online community hosts and managers have highlighted a variety of issues that recur across many online community development efforts. We summarize those issues in eight points that have functioned as useful guidelines to working with online communities, particularly within a corporate context. These recommendations...
2020 Copyright for this paper by its author(s). In the context of data visualization and analytics, this report outlines some of the challenges and emerging applications that arise in the Big Data era. In particularly, fourteen distinguished scientists from academia and industry, and diverse related communities, i.e., Information Visualization, Hum...
In the context of data visualization and analytics, this report out-lines some of the challenges and emerging applications that arise in the Big Data era. In particularly, fourteen distinguished scientists from academia and industry, and diverse related communities, i.e., Information Visualization, Human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, Data...
Analysts need interactive speed for exploratory analysis, but big data systems are often slow. With sampling, data systems can produce approximate answers fast enough for exploratory visualization, at the cost of accuracy and trust. We propose optimistic visualization, which approaches these issues from a user experience perspective. This method le...
Data analysts often need to work with multiple series of data---conventionally shown as line charts---at once. Few visual representations allow analysts to view many lines simultaneously without becoming overwhelming or cluttered. In this paper, we introduce the DenseLines technique to calculate a discrete density representation of time series. Den...
Pangloss implements "Optimistic Visualization", a method that gives analysts confidence to use approximate results for exploratory data analysis. In this paper, we outline how analysts' experience with an approximate visualization system did not match their intuitions. These observations have implications for the design of future data exploration s...
Analysts need interactive speed for exploratory analysis, but big data systems are often slow. With sampling, data systems can produce approximate answers fast enough for exploratory visualization, at the cost of accuracy and trust. We propose optimistic visualization, which approaches these issues from a user experience perspective. This method le...
Large software organizations are transitioning to event data platforms as they culturally shift to better support data-driven decision making. This paper offers a case study at Microsoft during such a transition. Through qualitative interviews of 28 participants, and a quantitative survey of 1,823 respondents, we catalog a diverse set of activities...
As real-time monitoring and analysis become increasingly important, researchers and developers turn to data stream management systems (DSMS's) for fast, efficient ways to pose temporal queries over their datasets. However, these systems are inherently complex, and even database experts find it difficult to understand the behavior of DSMS queries. T...
A common workflow for visualization designers begins with a generative tool, like D3 or Processing, to create the initial visualization; and proceeds to a drawing tool, like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, for editing and cleaning. Unfortunately, this is typically a one-way process: once a visualization is exported from the generative tool into a dr...
Data scientists often conduct exploratory data analysis in scripting environments with a read-eval-print loop (REPL), like R, IPython or MATLAB. This user experience requires diligent management of execution and generates lengthy histories of unwanted command responses. This paper explores the alternative of live programming, a user experience in w...
Many different domains collect event sequence data and rely on finding and analyzing patterns within it to gain meaningful insights. Current systems that support such queries either provide limited expressiveness, hinder exploratory workflows or present interaction and visualization models which do not scale well to large and multi-faceted data set...
The subject disclosure is directed towards simulating query execution to provide incremental visualization for a global data set. A data store may be configured for searching at least a portion of a global data set being stored at an enterprise-level data store. In response to a user-issued query, partial query results are provided to a front-end i...
The described implementations relate to unified application building. In one implementation unified application building tools can include a unifying component model configured to communicate with a set of components that are supported by different frameworks. The unified application building tools can also include a unification engine configured t...
This paper introduces Trill -- a new query processor for analytics. Trill fulfills a combination of three requirements for a query processor to serve the diverse big data analytics space: (1) Query Model: Trill is based on a tempo-relational model that enables it to handle streaming and relational queries with early results, across the latency spec...
The pluggable web-based visualization technique described herein pertains to a method for providing pluggable web-based visualizations for applications. The method selects visualizations from the web to be embedded into a host application on a desktop computing device. The visualizations can be plugged in to a variety of host applications. This emp...
This special issue turns the spotlight on business intelligence (BI) as an area of inquiry and explores beyond the current standard practices. The articles in the issue describe the processes that practitioners currently follow in this area and how new BI techniques and capabilities will help users understand and act on widely disparate types of da...
In recent years many popular data visualizations have emerged that are created largely by designers whose main area of expertise is not computer science. Designers generate these visualizations using a handful of design tools and environments. To better inform the development of tools intended for designers working with data, we set out to understa...
Researchers are making efforts to reduce legacy bias, which is a limitation of current elicitation methods. There are many open challenges in updating elicitation methods to incorporate production, priming, and partner techniques. Gesture elicitation is emerging as a potential approach to address this challenge. Gesture elicitation has been applied...
We often use datasets that reflect samples, but many visualization tools treat data as full populations. Uncertain visualizations are good at representing data distributions emerging from samples, but are more limited in allowing users to carry out decision tasks. This is because tasks that are simple on a traditional chart (e.g. "compare two bars"...
Labeling data is a seemingly simple task required for training many machine learning systems, but is actually fraught with problems. This paper introduces the notion of concept evolution, the changing nature of a person's underlying concept (the abstract notion of the target class a person is labeling for, e.g., spam email, travel related web pages...
Described are systems and user interfaces for facilitating asynchronous communication with video threads. Implementations may enable members of a team to have threaded view of video messages, from which they can capture video, record their screen, and send, receive, and reply to a video message. The screen recording feature enables team members to...
An overwhelming number of articles are available everyday via the internet. Unfortunately, it is impossible to peruse more than a handful, and it is difficult to ascertain an article's social context. The techniques disclosed herein address this problem by harnessing implicit and explicit contextual information from social media. By extracting text...
Conveying a narrative with visualizations often requires choosing an order in which to present visualizations. While evidence exists that narrative sequencing in traditional stories can affect comprehension and memory, little is known about how sequencing choices affect narrative visualization. We consider the forms and reactions to sequencing in n...
Performance is a critical component of customer satisfaction with network-based applications. Unfortunately, accurately evaluating the performance of collaborative software that operates in extremely heterogeneous environments is difficult with traditional techniques such as modeling workloads or testing in controlled environments. To evaluate perf...
Exploratory analysis on big data requires us to rethink data management across the entire stack -- from the underlying data processing techniques to the user experience. We demonstrate Stat! -- a visualization and analytics environment that allows users to rapidly experiment with exploratory queries over big data. Data scientists can use Stat! to q...
A system and method for identifying a root cause of a wait in a computer system are provided. Given the identity of a thread of interest and time window, a longest wait period for the thread of interest within the time window is identified. The longest wait period is used as a starting node to generate a ready tree by walking backwards through the...
A data trends static visualization system and method including a data trends static visualization diagram for statically visualizing changes in data. The data trends static visualization diagram is a multi-dimensional static diagram including plots of multiple data items, where each data item is a set of related data having associated nodes and lin...
As more applications move from the desktop to touch devices like tablets, designers must wrestle with the costs of porting a design with as little revision of the UI as possible from one device to the other, or of optimizing the interaction per device. We consider the tradeoffs between two versions of a UI for working with data on a touch tablet. O...
Various types of data can be collected into a data set and related content and/or related concepts across the data in the data set and/or across search histories can be displayed as a visual representation. The related content/concepts can be presented as a function of incremental revealing of relationships. After reviewing the visual representatio...
Assisted clustering systems and methods are described herein that provide a user interface by which a user can easily create clusters and selectively associate data items with such clusters. Information regarding data item-cluster associations made by the user is processed by a recommendation engine to learn a clustering model. The clustering model...
Large datasets can mean slow queries, for which users must wait. Incremental visualization systems can give faster results at a cost of accuracy. This article asked analysts to use one and report on their results. Their feedback provides suggestions for alternative visualizations to represent a query still in progress.
Temporal events with multiple sets of metadata attributes, i.e., facets, are ubiquitous across different domains. The capabilities of efficiently viewing and comparing events data from various perspectives are critical for revealing relationships, making hypotheses, and discovering patterns. In this paper, we present TimeSlice, an interactive facet...
Queries over large scale (petabyte) data bases often mean waiting overnight for a result to come back. Scale costs time. Such time also means that potential avenues of exploration are ignored because the costs are perceived to be too high to run or even propose them. With sampleAction we have explored whether interaction techniques to present query...
Queries over large scale (petabyte) data bases often mean waiting overnight for a result to come back. Scale costs time. Such time also means that potential avenues of exploration are ignored because the costs are perceived to be too high to run or even propose them. With sampleAction we have explored whether interaction techniques to present query...
Big data is useful for HCI researchers and user interface design. As one example, A/B testing is a standard practice in the usability community to help determine relative differences in user performance using different interfaces. This can help product teams discover large, real-world usability issues while supplementing laboratory techniques that...
Co-located collaboration can be extremely valuable during complex visual analytics tasks. We present an exploratory study of a system designed to support collaborative visual analysis tasks on a digital tabletop display. Fifteen participant pairs employed Cambiera, a visual analytics system, to solve a problem involving 240 digital documents. Our a...
Exploratory data visualization calls for iterative analyses, but very large databases are often far too slow to allow interactive exploration. Incremental, approximate database queries exchange precision for speed: by sampling from the full database, the system can resolve queries rapidly. As the sample gets broader, the precision increases at the...
Sorting and clustering large numbers of documents can be an overwhelming task: manual solutions tend to be slow, while machine learning systems often present results that don't align well with users' intents. We created and evaluated a system for helping users sort large numbers of documents into clusters. iCluster has the capability to recommend n...
Cambiera is a tabletop system designed for co-located collaborative visual analytics. As a tabletop system, Cambiera encourages analysts to face each other around the tabletop to analyze large text document collections collaboratively. Cambiera allows analysts to search for documents and read them, organize documents on the tabletop, and to monitor...
In order to use new visualizations, most toolkits require application developers to rebuild their applications and distribute new versions to users. The WebCharts Framework take a different approach by hosting JavaScript from within an application and providing a standard data and events interchange. In this way, applications can be extended dynami...
We report on our work towards understanding analytic rea-soning processes in face-to-face collaborative analysis using visualization techniques. How analysts reason is an active topic of research and in our community we know even less about how a group forms an understanding, insight, and reasons about data. We report on our effort in cap-turing th...
Collaborative information seeking often takes place in co-located settings; such opportunities may be planned (business colleagues meeting in a conference room or students working together in a library) or spontaneous (family members gathered in their living room or friends meeting at a café). Surface computing technologies (i.e., interactive table...
Co-located collaboration can be extremely valuable during complex visual analytics tasks. This paper presents an exploratory study of a system designed to support collaborative visual analysis tasks on a digital tabletop display. Fifteen participant pairs employed Cam-biera, a visual analytics system, to solve a problem involving 240 digital docume...
The goal of a research institution is, ultimately, to share and disseminate knowledge. Yet the sheer volume of information produced by large institutions makes it challenging to keep track of the vast knowledge within. Information on who knows what is often scattered across multiple sources and media. Expertise tracking systems allow users to searc...
Interactive clustering refers to situations in which a human labeler is willing to assist a learning algorithm in automatically clustering items. We present a related but somewhat different task, assisted clustering, in which a user creates explicit groups of items from a large set and wants suggestions on what items to add to each group. While the...
The Voronoi Treemap is a space-filling treemap technique that relaxes the constraints of rectangular nodes. Its organic shapes maintain a one-to-one aspect ratio, are flexible with their placement, allowing stable zooming and dynamic data values. In this paper, we present algorithms for efficient computation and dynamic update of Voronoi Treemaps....
Social, collaborative web applications such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr are invaluable sources of network, social, and behavioral data. They are also increasingly used to recruit participants for experimental, survey, interview and ethnographic studies. Two sets of issues arise for conducting relevant, valuable, ethical and meaningful research. Fi...
Interactive clustering refers to situations in which a human labeler is willing to assist a learning algorithm in automatically clustering items. We present a related but somewhat different task, assisted clustering , in which a user creates explicit groups of items from a large set and wants suggestions on what items to add to each group. While th...
The research presented in this paper compares user-generated and automatic graph layouts. Following the methods suggested by van Ham et al. (2008), a group of users generated graph layouts using both multi-touch interaction on a tabletop display and mouse interaction on a desktop computer. Users were asked to optimize their layout for aesthetics an...
Information visualization is the art and science of representing abstract information in a visual form that enables human users to gain insight through their perceptual and cognitive capabilities. In this chapter, we examine some key human factors aspects of information visualizations. We begin with an overview of major information visualization pr...
Two-handed, multi-touch surface computing provides a scope for in- teractions that are closer analogues to physical interactions than classical win- dowed interfaces. The design of natural and intuitive gestures is a difficult problem as we do not know how users will approach a new multi-touch inter- face and which gestures they will attempt to use...
Many real-world analysis tasks can benefit from the combined efforts of a group of people. Past research has shown that to design visualizations for collaborative visual analytics tasks, we need to support both individual as well as joint analysis activities. We present Cambiera, a tabletop visual analytics tool that supports individual and collabo...
People regularly interact with different representations of Web pages. A person looking for new information may initially find a Web page represented as a short snippet rendered by a search engine. When he wants to return to the same page the next day, the page may instead be represented by a link in his browser history. Previous research has explo...
People regularly interact with different representations of Web pages. A person looking for new information may initially find a Web page represented as a short snippet rendered by a search engine. When he wants to return to the same page the next day, the page may instead be represented by a link in his browser history. Previous research has explo...
In 2006, we released Hotmap internally at Microsoft. Hotmap illuminates how users have used Virtual Earth by visualizing the tiles that have been looked at by users. While the technical aspects and basic usage of Hotmap have been previously discussed [1][2], this paper discusses the next steps: the impact of Hotmap, the ways that Hotmap was used ov...
Analyzing unstructured text streams can be challenging. One popular approach is to isolate specific themes in the text, and to visualize the connections between them. Some existing systems, like ThemeRiver, provide a temporal view of changes in themes; other systems, like In-Spire, use clustering techniques to help an analyst identify the themes at...
We argue that there is a continuum between completely manual and completely automated management of networks and distributed applications. The ability to visualize the status of the network and applications inside a data center allows human users to rapidly asses the health of the system - quickly identifying problems that span across components an...
Animation has been used to show trends in multi-dimensional data. This technique has recently gained new prominence for presentations, most notably with Gapminder Trendalyzer. In Trendalyzer, animation together with interesting data and an engaging presenter helps the audience understand the results of an analysis of the data. It is less clear whet...
The recent introduction of simple, web-based geographic visualization interfaces has unleashed a tidal wave of new geographic content now available on the Internet. There has been enormous attention on the development of data interchange standards and programming interfaces that make all this content interoperable, but far less thought about how th...
The already huge number of blogs in existence is increasing rapidly, and many users are struggling to find a way to keep up with the expansion. A number of existing tools aim to capture the general topics of all currently popular topics among the entire blogosphere, while others allow individuals to read a fixed list of blogs. However, few personal...
An overwhelming number of news articles are available every day via the internet. Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to peruse more than a handful; furthermore it is difficult to ascer- tain an article's social context, i.e., is it popular, what sorts of people are reading it, etc. In this paper, we develop a system to address this problem in t...
Several years of consulting with online community hosts and managers have highlighted a variety of issues that recur across many online community development efforts. We summarize those issues in eight points that have functioned as useful guidelines to working with online communities, particularly within a corporate context. These recommendations...
Understanding how people use online maps allows data acquisition teams to concentrate their efforts on the portions of the map that are most seen by users. Online maps represent vast databases, and so it is insufficient to simply look at a list of the most-accessed URLs. Hotmap takes advantage of the design of a mapping system's imagery pyramid to...
Email archives are full of social information, including how messages are addressed and frequency of contact between senders and receivers. To study the use of this rich metadata for email management, particularly email triage, we deployed SNARF, a prototype tool which uses social metadata to organize received email by correspondent, sort received...
Ten years ago, Whittaker and Sidner (8) published research on email overload, coining a term that would drive a research area that continues today. We examine a sample of 600 mailboxes collected at a high-tech company to compare how users organize their email now to 1996. While inboxes are roughly the same size as in 1996, our population's email ar...
We present an eight-point scale of email overload to assess users' feelings of email overload. Based on previous research, we designed a survey to examine email overload. 292 subjects filled out the survey as part of a software deployment. Eight of our questions worked together well as a scale, which can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of fut...
Online discussion groups have a network structure that emerges from the interactions of thousands of participants, writing in thousands of topical threads. This structure varies greatly according to the type of discussion group, such as technical, fan or support. Political groups have their own distinctive structure, organized around ideologically...
Usenet is a complex socio-technical phenomenon, containing vast quantities of information. The sheer scope and complexity make it a challenge to understand the many dimensions across which people and communication are interlinked. In this work, we present visualizations of several aspects and scales of Usenet that combine to highlight the range of...
Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. This process can quickly become a serious problem for users with large volumes of email. Studies have found that people use a variety of approaches to triage their email, many of which have a social component. We believe that email clients can better suppo...
Do online political discussions tend to aggregate diverse voices in cross-cutting debate and deliberation. Or do ?audiences? for online discussion tend to fragment into ideological echo chambers? In the wilds of threaded discussion on the internet (as opposed to deliberative polls, moderated discussions, and other designed venues of deliberation),...
We propose a new method for assessing the perceptual organization of information graphics, based on the premise that the visual structure of an image should match the structure of the data it is intended to convey. The core of our method is a new formal model of one type of perceptual structure, based on classical machine vision techniques for anal...
Everyday work frequently involves coordinating and collaborating with others, but the structure of collaboration is largely invisible to conventional desktop applications. We are exploring ways to support everyday collaboration by allowing applications access to the social, organizational, and temporal settings within which work is conducted. In th...
Abstract We propose a new method for assessing the perceptual organization of information graphics, based on the premise that the visual structure of an image should match the structure of the data it is intended to convey. The core of our method is a new formal model of one type of perceptual structure, based on classical machine vision techniques...
There are few quantitative techniquesfor directly measly p3email usiatterns5Thisaer des165p'3an automated tool that, with a us29s ermis4p'38 readstheir mail databas4 to createa one-time ss-tiand gathersrelevant s p29203p' and behavioral information. We s49927pfully collected im ortant sant p1996 about mest p2threading, foldersnand mail volume. Ourt...
The rise of virtual collocation in distributed organizations may
lead to new patterns of technology adoption. Whereas previous studies of
technology diffusion (e.g. Rogers, 1995) point to the role of mass media
and interpersonal communication in adoption, we find that collaborating
partners who rarely see one another are important contributors to t...
We present a Java-based framework, SWAMI (Shared Wisdom through the Amalgamation of Many Interpretations) for building and studying collaborative filtering systems. SWAMI consists of three components: a prediction engine, an evaluation system, and a visualization component. The prediction engine provides a common interface for implementing differen...
In this paper, we discuss differences in reciprocity in core networks in email inboxes using data from 538 cases at a high-tech organization. We highlight the fact that reciprocity in email behavior is different between multi-recipient and dyadic mail and that a consistent number of alters send disproportionate volumes of mail.
One way of conceptualizing physical spaces is to look at where people notice, remember, or note them. Computer-assisted methods give us new tools based on implicit, rather than explicit, data about how users have examined and travelled online through cities. "Hotmap" is a tool that visualizes how people have used maps.live.com, an interactive mappi...
Most everyday tasks performed on or through computer systems involve multiple people. Documents are written for others and sent to them; email messages arrive from individuals and are sent to groups; web pages are written for others to read, and presentations are created to communicate ideas to others. By contrast, most interactive computer systems...
There are few quantitative techniques for directly measuring email use patterns. This paper describes an automated tool that, with a user's permission, reads their mail database to create a one-time snapshot and gathers relevant structural and behavioral information. We successfully collected important statistics about message threading, folders, a...
Desktop search applications are changing the way we interact with personal information: we have a choice of whether to view files within their traditional siloed hierarchies, or brought together in search results. In this position paper, we discuss the advantages of temporal ordering of desktop search results, and present an interface that aggregat...
The Voronoi Treemap is a space-filling treemap technique that relaxes the constraints of rectangular nodes. Its organic shapes maintain a one-to-one aspect ratio, are flexible with their placement, allowing stable zooming and dynamic data values. This poster articulates the tradeoffs that go into generating dynamic treemaps. We then present innovat...
In this position paper we argue that PIM applications can benefit from making use of social information. More specifically, based on our research focusing on email, we have seen that two concepts can help people interact and manage email: 1) organizing information by people and 2) making use of the social history of correspondence. We describe our...
Everyday life is very different, though. In the everyday world, we don't talk about interacting with inform ation, but with other people. Our daily activities are suffused with other people, and the inform ation that we process is typically enm eshed in processes by which we com municate, collaborate, and deliberate with others. Our computers m ay...
Finding ways for information workers to easily create and modify visualizations that display their own data has been a long time goal within the visualization community. We describe Vis-à-vis, a declarative language for defining and extending visu-alizations directly within spreadsheets. Vis-a-vis allows users to directly bind data and formula to t...
Citations
... Researchers have also attempted to automate the bias recognition using text processing techniques. Blews system uses text processing along with link analysis to find the emotional sentiment towards liberal or conservative stance (Gamon et al., 2008). DisputeFinder which is a web browser extension utilises text processing to highlight disputed text in a webpage (Ennals et al., 2010). ...
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... In order to advance in this field, many research challenges sill remain to be tackled. In the context of generic challenges in visual data science and application opportunities, we refer to a recent overview by Andrienko et al. [3]. ...
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... Recently a significant amount of research work has been focused on the domain of information visualization, mainly focusing on the alternative means and strategies for visualizing big data [38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. At the same time, the type of visualization and the visualization medium has been proven to be of extreme importance and several attempts have been made to utilize different presentation mediums, display formats, and interaction types [45][46][47][48][49][50]. ...
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... This limitation does not apply to ML techniques, where a system does not need to be that responsive to queries by the user. One step that is done towards responsive visualization with large datasets is Progressive Analytics [22]. ...
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... Thus, biased sampling hinders the advent of each stage and prolongs wait time for users. Moreover, users' trust in approximate answers is an intrinsic challenge of incremental visualization [43] and sampling bias can exacerbate the trust issue. For example, one effective visualization technique to help users become confident in the analytic results is to compute the exact answers offline so users can compare their selected, approximate answers against exact ones and redo their analyses if needed [44]. ...