IRMACS: The Interdisciplinary Colloquium: "Human-information discourse in visual analytics or, What Friedrich Bessel can teach us about interaction design"

Abstract

Innovations in information and communication technology enable us to collect and process immense quantities of data. These data can potentially inform decision-making in areas as diverse as science and medicine, design and manufacturing, and law enforcement and disaster relief, but require us to learn how to make large sets of complex information accessible and understandable to knowledge workers. This challenge has led to the new field of Visual analytics (Thomas and Cook, 2005), defined as "the science of analytical reasoning supported by the interactive visual interface". It seeks to learn from the expertise of human designers and from the perceptual and cognitive sciences to learn how to produce computer-generated representations of complex datasets that aid users' cognitive abilities to understand the situations they represent.

This talk will examine one aspect of the visual analytics effort, the creation of a scientific basis for graphical and interaction design for cognitive tasks. Immersive and multimodal interactive technologies challenge graphical and interaction designers to predict how their complex creations will be perceived and understood. This is true for a variety of reasons, but I will concentrate on two of them-- the counterintuitive nature of human perceptual response (in general), and the different responses of individuals' perception in novel sensory environments. The solution may rest in a combination of grounded qualitative analysis of real-world situations and mathematical and computational modeling of human information processing.