A workshop at the VisWeek 2012 Conference on October 14(/15), 2012 in Seattle, WA, USA.

BELIV 2012 - Notes

Day 1 Wrap-up - Click this link to see our notes from Day 1, to be used for discussion on Day 2

About

Visualization has recently gained much relevance for its ability to cope with complex data analysis tasks and communication. While the overall use visualizations is accelerating, the growth of techniques for the evaluation of these systems has been slow. To understand these complex behaviors, evaluation efforts should be targeted at the component level, the system level, and the work environment level. The commonly used evaluation metrics such as task time completion and number of errors appear insufficient to quantify the quality of a visualization system; thus the name of the workshop: "beyond time and errors ...". The BELIV workshop series is a biennial event focusing on the challenges of evaluation in visualization. While it has been focused on information visualization in the past, BELIV 2012 aims at gathering researchers in all fields of visualization to continue the exploration of novel evaluation methods, and to structure the knowledge on evaluation in visualization around a schema, where researchers can easily identify unsolved problems and research gaps. This is the fourth edition of the BELIV workshop series and this edition will be a will be a two-day workshop. It will be held as an open full-day workshop with paper presentations and discussions on October 14th and continue on the 15th with focused discussion for attendees interested to follow-up on topics and challenges raised during the first day. The second day is meant as an extended opportunity for participants and organizers to re-engage most active discussion topics of the first day. The second day of the workshop will take place in the beautiful Seattle Public Library where we are kindly sponsored by Google and Microsoft.

Planned Activities

Taking feedback from our past participants, BELIV 2012 will continue to emphasize interactions between attendees so that participants can produce tangible outcomes during the workshop that will have impact on the visualization community at large. BELIV 2012 will be a full-day workshop with eight 45 minute sessions. Our goal is to combine discussions and paper presentations into one event in a panel-based format such that we can accommodate a much larger audience than in the past. Presentations will be essential to provide context for our audience, especially given that the workshop is open to all participants of the VisWeek conferences, and we expect a much larger number of attendees than in previous years.

To avoid turning our workshop into a mini-conference, we will tightly integrate the presentations with discussions. We will assign accepted papers (both research and position) to eight groups, one for each workshop session. In each group, paper authors will together create a group presentation for the session prior to the workshop. Rather than providing overviews for each specific paper, the main goal of the overview presentation is to build the basis for panel-based discussions on the session topic afterwards. The presentation will, therefore, be a summary of the state-of-the-art of the topic, illustrated by materials from the accepted papers. Each group will be given 15-20 minutes for the presentation. The remaining hour will be devoted to a panel discussion where authors of the papers will serve as the panel and discuss the topic with the audience. Workshop organizers will take notes during the discussion to tease out potential topics for further and more in-depth discussions after the workshop, ideally conducted in smaller groups.

At the end of the first day of the workshop, the organizers will post topics collected during the panel discussions for workshop attendees to vote and to comment. As the VisWeek open workshop format makes smaller in-depth discussions with groups more challenging, we will invite participation to follow-up discussions on the day after the official workshop on an off-site venue arranged by the workshop organizers. This second day will be complimentary to the first day, and its existence will not offer a diminished experience for those who choose to only attend the first day. Rather, it is an extended opportunity for participants and organizers to re-engage most active discussion topics of the first day. In addition to the selected topics on the second day, the organizers will lead a discussion on broader issues of the workshop such as 1) how to impact the community (e.g., publishing a research agenda in a journal); 2) how to set up an infrastructure to maintain the discussion alive beyond after the workshop; 3) how and where to organize BELIV 2014.

Dates

Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2012, new extended deadline: September 5, 2012
Notification of acceptance: September 24, 2012
Camera ready papers due: October 1, 2012
Workshop: October 14/(15), 2012

How to participate

All registered attendees of VisWeek will be able to attend the workshop. In order to present a paper and participate as a panelist in the discussions, it is necessary to have a paper accepted. The panel discussion itself is open to everybody.

Organizers

Enrico Bertini: University of Konstanz
Adam Perer: IBM Research
Heidi Lam: Google Inc.
Petra Isenberg: INRIA
Tobias Isenberg: INRIA, CNRS, University of Groningen

Advisors

Catherine Plaisant: University of Maryland
Giuseppe Santucci: Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy

Pictures