Abstract
The chapter presents ten selected user interface and interaction challenges in extreme-scale visual analytics. The study of visual analytics is often referred to as “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces” in the literature. The discussion focuses on applying visual analytics technologies to extreme-scale scientific and non-scientific data ranging from petabyte to exabyte in sizes. The ten challenges are: in situ interactive analysis, user-driven data reduction, scalability and multi-level hierarchy, representation of evidence and uncertainty, heterogeneous data fusion, data summarization and triage for interactive query, analytics of temporally evolving features, the human bottleneck, design and engineering development, and the Renaissance of conventional wisdom. The discussion addresses concerns that arise from the different areas of hardware, software, computation, algorithms, and human factors. The chapter also evaluates the likelihood of success in meeting these challenges in the near future.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research under award number 59172, program manager Lucy Nowell; the National Science Foundation; the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate; the National Visualization and Analytics CenterTM at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; and the Pfizer Corporation.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by Battelle Memorial Institute under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.
Special thanks to Jim Thomas for his support and friendship through the years—he is missed.
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Wong, P.C., Shen, HW., Chen, C. (2012). Top Ten Interaction Challenges in Extreme-Scale Visual Analytics. In: Dill, J., Earnshaw, R., Kasik, D., Vince, J., Wong, P. (eds) Expanding the Frontiers of Visual Analytics and Visualization. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2804-5_12
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