Aidan Slingsby
Senior Lecturer in Visual and Analytic Computing

giCentre, Department of Computer Science, City, University of London


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News (new and old)

2021

December 2021: Would you like to do a PhD in Visual Analytics on green energy? We have a fully-funded PhD (funding only cover UK fees) working with Advanced Infrastructures Technology Limited which will be supervised by Radu Jianu and me based at giCentre.
October 2021: I've been working on some "glyphmaps" to support Claire Harris's (BIOSS) and Richard Reeve's (Glasgow University) COVID-modelling effort on the RAMP-VIS project (coordinated by Min Chen). More information (including a Java implementation) is here.
July 2021: Congratulations to our Computer Science graduands who graduated at the 11:00 virtual ceremony on 29th July. It was an honour to present the awards.
June 2021: My workshop paper with Pauline Morgades on assessing the geographical structure of species richness data with interactive graphics is based on her MSc project last year and was presented at the EnvirVis workshop at EuroVis "in" Zurich. There is a teaser and the full talk.
January 2021: We have some new fully-funded PhD opportunities with a deadline at the end of April. If you would like to do a PhD with me, do get in touch. I would be interested in supervising projects on Visual Analytics. These may include designing, implementing and evaluating interactive methods for facilitating problem-solving, particularly for data and problems with complex, interesting and/or unusual characteristics.
January 2021: I have (finally) added more details about my BirdGpsExplorer software, which I've been writing/improving on/off for the last decade. It facilitates interaction visual exploration of GPS track data. Give it a go!
January 2021: Congratulations to our Computer Science graduands who graduated in a virtual ceremony on 20th January. Special congratulations Johannes Liem and Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan for their giCentre PhDs and also to the MSc in Data Science cohort. It was an honour to present the awards.

2020

December 2020: Our EPSRC research proposal "Making Visual Analytics an Integral Part of the Technological Infrastructure for Combating COVID-19: was successful. The multi-university bid led by Min Chen at Oxford and will be working with the Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium. I will be working with Richard Reeve and Claire Harris at Glasgow University.
December 2020: Our "RateSetter" project led by Risk Solutions has just won funding from RSSB. I will be designing, applying and implementing interactive visualisation to help the railway industry assess the impact of COVID-related measures on the train punctuality, from Risk Solutions' agent based model.
October 2020: I chaired the Geospatial Data session at the IEEE VIS conference in Salt Lake City in October. A really interesting set of papers, delivered over YouTube and Discord.
October 2020: The Visual Analytics for Data Scientists text book that I have co-written along with Natalia Andrienko, Gennady Andrienko, Georg Fuchs, Cagatay Turkay and Steffan Wrobel is now available, aimed and Data Scientists who want to make use of interactive visualisation to support analysis.
September 2020: Welcome to 140 MSc in Data Science students who have just started at City. If you would like to join the first MSc in Data Science offered in London, please see our application pages.
September 2020: I have just accepted an invitation to serve on the EuroVis Papers Committee, to help select papers to be presented at the EuroVis conference in Summer, which is planned to be (virtually) held "in" Zurich.
August 2020: I have just accepted an invitation to serve on the VIS best papers committee for the IEEE VIS conference in Salt Lake City in October.
June 2020: My interactive visualision work was included in a presentation to the UK Rail Minister as part of a showcase projects that were recently funded by RSSB on behalf of the UK rail industry.
June 2020: I am one of the number of UK visualisation academics who is volunteering to provide visual analytics assistance to COVID modellers from the Royal Society's Scottish Coronavirus Response Consortium (RAMP). We will be helping the modelling effort throughout the summer.
August 2020: I have just accepted an invitation to serve on the VIS papers committee for the IEEE VIS conference in Salt Lake City in October.

2019

November 2019: "The Rail Performance Model" proposal led by Risk Solutions has been successfully funded. This follows from the previous project, but has involves more partners including Great Western Railway, Great Anglia and Network Rail. Whilst the previous project was a feasibility study, here we will implement a toolset to be used by the UK rail industry, including timetable design. We will be producing a number of case studies.

2018

April 2018: My feasibility study proposal Agent based modelling and visualisation of the causes and consequences of knock-on delays with Risk Solutions and Great Western Railway has been successfully funded. It is funded by RSSB, the rail industry's research arm that funds applied research that is likely to improve the way the railway run. Risk Solutions will be creating an agent-based model that models reactionary delay and I will be designing and implementing interactive visualisation that will help make the results actionable.
February 2018: We have new fully-funded PhD opportunities! See the list of potential projects from my colleagues and I and choose one to develop or come up with your own. If you're interested, please contact us well before the 27th April deadline.

2017

August 2017: I was invited to the Lorentz Center workshop in Leiden (Netherlands) on Movement: New Sensors, New Data, New Challenges organised by Kevin Buchin, Urska Demsar, Kamran Safi and Rob Weibel. We worked on a number of data challenges using animal tracking data capturing with a variety of different types of sensors.
July 2017: I organised a small workshop where we brainstormed some research ideas with staff from the UK's Animal and Plant Health Agency to tackle questions of the spread of animal disase. This was funded by small grant from City's "pump-priming" funding.
June 2017: I attended the EnvirVis workshop at EuroVis in Barcelona and presented my paper Visual Characterisation of Temporal Occupancy for Movement Ecology.
April 2017: I attended GISRUK and presented my paper with Emiel van Loon on Temporal tile-maps for characterising the temporal occupancy of places: A seabird case study. My colleague Roger Beecham presented joint work on spatially varying explanations behind the UK's vote to leave the EU". The conference is celebrating its 25th anniversity and keynotes from Bob Barr and Bruce Gittings were useful reflections on the evolution of the discipline over this time.

2016

November 2016: My paper led by Cagatay "Supporting Theoretically-grounded Model Building in the Social Sciences through Interactive Visualisation" has been accepted to the Neurocomputing journal. We show how interactive visualisation can help social scientists build predictive models that are grounds in social science theory.
November 2016: I acted as the opponent for Andreas Halls' PhD thesis entitled Reasoning in Spatio-Temporal Analysis. His excellent thesis discussion at his public defence, resulted in my recommmendation of a pass with distinction. Very well done Andreas! The defence was attended by his family, friends and colleagues. Thank you to all for your part in organising such a nice day. Andreas was advised by Paula Ahonen-Rainio and supervised by Kirsi Virrantaus.
August 2016: My co-authored paper with colleagues led by Roger Beecham - Map LineUps: effects of spatial structure on graphical inference has received an Honorable Mention.
August 2016: I have co-authored two papers that were accepted to the IEEE InfoVis conference in Baltimore in October and will appear IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics: Map LineUps: effects of spatial structure on graphical inference led by Roger Beecham and Small Multiples with Gaps led by Wouter Meulemans.
June 2016: I co-chaired the pre-Agile Visually-informed computational movement analysis workshop with Urska Demsar and Rob Weibel. We had an interesting day with 8 short paper presentations, 5 live demos (most of which were using the same datasets) and three discussion groups discussing linking dynamic streams, multi-sensor solutions and interactions between moving objects. Thank you to all participants' contributions!
June 2016: My paper Exploratory Visual Analysis for Animal Movement Ecology with Emiel van Loon has now been published in Computer Graphics Forum, with associated software tool and video.
June 2016: Our paper Faceted Views of Varying Emphasis (FaVVEs): a framework for visualising multi-perspective small multiples has now been published in in Computer Graphics Forum. The work was led by Chris Rooney (Middlesex) and Roger Beecham (City) with other co-authors as Sebastian Meier, Jason Dykes, Cagatay Turkay, Jo Wood and William Wong.
June 2016: I attended EuroVis in Groningen (Netherlands), at which I presented my "Exploratory Visual Analysis for Animal Movement Ecology" paper and chaired a STAR session which included cartograms and financial data visualisation. Roger and Chris (Middlesex) presented our "Faceted Views of Varying Emphasis (FaVVEs)" paper.
May 2016: I was invited to speak about visualising climate data at the Climate Services Masterclass in Bolzano (Italy) and saw nice case studies and the latest advances in Climate Services.
March 2016: Our paper Exploratory Visual Analysis for Animal Movement Ecology has been accepted at the EuroVis conference in Groningen (Netherlands). It will be presented in June and will appear as a paper in Computer Graphics Forum. My co-author is Emiel van Loon, a movement ecologist from the University of Amsterdam.
March 2016: Our paper Faceted Views of Varying Emphasis (FaVVEs): a framework for visualising multi-perspective small multiples has been accepted at the EuroVis conference in Groningen (Netherlands). It will be presented in June and will appear as a paper in Computer Graphics Forum. The work was led by Chris Rooney (Middlesex) and Roger Beecham (City) with other co-authors as Sebastian Meier, Jason Dykes, Cagatay Turkay, Jo Wood and William Wong.
January 2016: Rob Weibel (Zurich), Urska Demar (St Andrew's) and I had our workshop proposal Visually-supported Computational Movement Analysis accepted for the Agile conference in Helsinki this summer. We are looking for short paper contributions from those who do visually-supported analysis of movement in any domain and entries to our data challenge.

2015

December 2015: I have joined the papers committees for both the EuroVA workshop at EuroVis (June) and the InfoVis conference at IEEE VIS (October) and look forward to reviewing and helping coordinate the reviewing process.
December 2015: I acted as external PhD examiner to Azira Ab Aziz at the School of Management at Southampton University. She looked at how the Reperatory Grid and Personal Construct theory could be applied to evaluating knowledge visualisation. I'm pleased to say that she passed, subject to some corrections - well done!
October 2015: I attended IEEE VIS in Chicago where co-authors presented one full paper and four posters.
August 2015: Four posters I have co-authored have been accepted at IEEE VIS in Chicago: Informing Non-Response Bias Model Creation in Social Surveys with Visualisation, Exploring Temporal Granularities with Visualization, Multi-Perspective Synopsis with Faceted Views of Varying Emphasis and Supporting crime analysis through visual design.
July 2015: Sarah, Jason, Cagatay and I have the paper "Visualizing Multiple Variables Across Scale and Geography" accepted for presentation at IEEE VIS in Chicago this October and publication in Transactions of Visualization and Computer Graphics.
January 2015: I have been invited onto the InfoVis papers committee and look forward to reviewing and helping coordinate reviews for this high quality conference which will take place in Chicago in October.

2014

December 2014: An OD map of where female migration outnumbers male migration for 1851 and 1911 with co-authors Mary Kelly and Jason Dykes has been published as a Featured Graphic in Environment and Planning A. It shows that woman migrated more locally in 1851 but that by 1911 the situation has changed with more female migration that is less local and with Dublin and Belfast attracting more female migrants.
September 2014: I was at GIScience in Vienna. I co-organised a workshop on uncertainty at which I presented joint work on Visualisation of Uncertainty in a Geodemographic Classifer [pdf] and The Challenge of Communicating Causes of Death and their Uncertainty [pdf]. Thanks to all contributors!
Joint work with me was also presented in other workshops: Rafael presented Designing Interactive Graphics for Exploring Sea-Bird Foraging Trips [pdf], Cagatay presented Interactive Generation of Visual Summaries for Multivariate Geographical Data Analysis [pdf], Sarah presented Visualizing the Effects of Scale and Geography in Multivariate Comparison [pdf] and Nick Tate presented Type-2 Fuzzy Sets Applied to Geodemographic Classification.

August 2014: Alex, Rafael and I won an honourable mention for our entry to the VAST Challenge (Mini Challenge 1) this year. This annual competition asks participants to do visual analytics on a large dataset to answer questions that is usually related to a crime or terrorism scenario.

June 2014: I was invited to a Geometric Algorithms in the Field workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, The Netherlands. The workshop brought together researchers in computational geometry, GIS, visualisation, robotics and surface/volume and allowing us to form cross-discipline research collaborations.

June 2014: My paper Designing an Exploratory Visual Interface to the Results of Citizen Surveys with Jason Dykes (colleague), Jo Wood (colleague) and Robert Radburn (Leicestershire County Council) has just been published in the International Journal of GIS. It presents, justifies and discusses an interactive visualisation design for allowing citizens to explore the results of a council survey. Play with the original applet here.

April 2014: Our TSB grant proposal "FareViz", for which I am a co-investigator, has been funded. The project will look at discrepancies in train fares across the UK and is a collaborative effort between City University (Machine Learning Group and giCentre), Placr, RailEasy and Digital MR.

April 2014: Our project Using multi-level multi-source auxiliary data to investigate non-response bias in UK general social surveys, for which I am co-investigator. has been funded by ESRC. The project will be led by the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys and will explore the extent to which non-response rates can be predicted from other data sources.

March 2014: Our EU-funded FP7 proposal VALCRI has been funded. The project is about visual analytics for sensemaking in criminal intelligence analysis. We are one of the 17 partners from around Europe for this 44 month project led by Middlesex University.

February 2014: I'm co-organising a workshop on Visually-Supported Reasoning with Uncertainty at GIScience in Vienna in September. Alan MacEachren (Penn State University) and Edzer Pebesma (University of Münster) have kindly agreed to give keynote talks. Please consider submitting something and attending to take part in the planned discussion groups.

2013

December 2013: Rafael Henkin has just started his PhD here, working with me and Emiel van Loon (University of Amsterdam) on linking statistics and visualisation to animal movement data and questions.

December 2013: My paper Visual Analysis of Social Networks in Space and Time using Smartphone Logs with Roger Beecham and Jo Wood is now published.

November 2013: I gave a talk about visualising moving object data as one of the giCentre contributions to our "Great ideas for visualising data" session City Unrulyversity along with Jason, Sarah and Rick. This initiative brings audiences from some of London's newest and most innovative technology companies together with academics from City University London to exchange new ideas in a stimulating and informal environment.

October 2013: I attended IEEE Vis in Atlanta at which two coauthored pieces of work were presented: An Extensible Framework for Provenance in Human Terrain Visual Analytics (presented by Rick, Middlesex University), Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers (presented by Sarah).
October 2013: I attended NACIS in Greenville (South Carolina) at which two coauthored pieces of work were presented: Visualizing Domestic Energy Consumption of the UK presented by Sarah and Storm Uncertainty Representation: User Responses to Novel Visualization presented by Jenny Mason based on her 3 month visit to the giCentre last summer.
September 2013: I've just been appointed as Lecturer in Visual and Analytic Computing.
September 2013: I attended the conference that concluded the EU MOVE-COST Action. The action facilitated collaboration between research across Europe and the conference presented its achievements as video presentations and talks. I presented the results of his research trip to work with bird ecologists and my entry to the Nokia Data Challenge. Mary Kelly represented joint work on Irish Migration maps and Andrea Kölzsch presented joint work on visualising migrating Goose data.
August 2013: My paper Visual Analysis of Social Networks in Space and Time using Smartphone Logs with Roger Beecham and Jo Wood is now available.
August 2013: My new video - Supporting the Visual Analysis of the Behaviour of Gulls - describes a two week research trip in 2011 where I worked with bird ecologists to design and implement visualisation techniques to understand bird behaviour, through exploring GPS tracking data in time and space. The work was funded by MOVE-COST and the tool is still in use by the ecologists.
August 2013: My new video - Studying Historical Internal Migration in Ireland using OD Maps (or How OD Maps Work) - describes how OD maps work, using historical internal Irish Migration as an example. OD maps are designed for showing flows between places and have some advantages over some other representations. This video explains how.
July 2013: I've had three papers recently accepted: Visual Analysis of Social Networks in Space and Time using Smartphone Logs in Pervasive and Mobile Computing, An Extensible Framework for Provenance in Human Terrain Visual Analytics in TCGV (VAST13) and Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers in TCGV (InfoVis13).
June 2013: I attended the EnvirVis workshop at Eurovis 2013 in Leipzig and presented joint work with Emiel van Loon entitled Visual Analytics for Exploring Changes in Biodiversity. Andrea Kölzsch presented joint work entitled Visualisation design for representing bird migration tracks in time and space.
May 2013: I met with ecologists from The Netherlands at the University of Amsterdam to discuss the use of visual analytics for assessing changes in biodiversity.
May 2013: My papers Visual Analytics for Exploring Changes in Biodiversity (with Emiel van Loon; visual analytics for studying biodiversity from millions of species observations) and Visualisation design for representing bird migration tracks in time and space (led by Andrea Kölzsch, with others; design options for depicting bird migration with static graphics) have been accepted at the EnvirVis workshop at EuroVis.
March 2013: I presented two contributions to GeoViz Hamburg, a workshop characterised by short focussed presentations, demos and lots of time for discussion. I presented "An Exploratory Interface to Public Data for Citizens" (with Jason Dykes, Jo Wood and Robert Radburn) and "Green Spaces: Interactively Mapping the Results of a Public Consultation" (with Robert Radburn).

March 2013: I attended a MOVE-COST meeting and presented work on visualisating migration data using OD maps. MOVE-COST is an EU-funded "action" which funds networking activities for work related to understanding moving object data and I will contribute to the final workshop which will showcase its achievements.

January 2013: I've had a conference abstract accepted for GISRUK in April: Historical Internal Migration in Ireland". Thanks to my co-authors Mary Kelly (National University of Ireland), Jason Dykes and Jo Wood.

January 2013: I've had two conference abstracts accepted for GeoViz Hamburg in March: "Exploratory Interface to Public Data for Citizens" and "Green Spaces: Interactively Mapping the Results of a Public Consultation". Thanks to my co-authors Jason Dykes, Jo Wood and Robert Radburn (Leicestershire County Council)

2012

December 2012: I participated in the Dagstuhl workshop on the representation, analysis and visualization of moving objects working with researchers from animal ecology, GIS, computational geometry and visualisation backgrounds. A small challenge was set up as part of the workshop that looked at whether information collected from physical sensors could be used to infer behaviour. My entry helps assess how well modelled behaviour corresponds to observed behaviour.

November 2012: I attended the Lloyds Science of Risk at which the best academic risk research of relevance to the insurance industry was honoured. Winning and shortlisted entries included work from Willis Research Network partners.

October 2012: I attended visweek in Seattle where I presented a position paper on involving users in information visualisation design at the BELIV workshop and presented a poster on visualising historical internal migration patterns in Ireland. Co-authored work on using sketchy graphics in information visualisation and our VAST Challenge entry were presented by colleagues.

September 2012: Jason and I ran an intensive week-long module at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, based on Jo Wood's excellent DataVis module offered to our students. The module taught theory, design and how to implement them in Processing. Students (most of whom had no previous programming experience) were able to produce nice interactive maps of Japan census data by the end of the week.

September 2012: I was invited to give a talk at the Center for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo. I talked about the recent Nokia Data Challenge including our entry, London's bike-share scheme and OD maps. These overlap with the centre's interests in map schematisation and visualising moving object data, in which they are doing good work.

September 2012: I was invited to participate in a workshop at Oxford university about challenges in geographical visualisation, organised by Min Chen and Jason Dykes. The diverse participation made the workshop a useful forum for discussion and making new contacts.

July 2012: My poster submission with Mary Kelly (National University of Ireland), Jason and Jo entitled OD Maps for Studying Historical Internal Migration in Ireland has been accepted at Visweek in Seattle in October. The poster will demonstrate the "OD Maps" technique to studying migration patterns. A video of the technique is available.

June 2012: I gave a talk about Visual Analytics for Social Science Data and Problems at the EPSRC-funded workshop that marked the launch of the Centre for GeoInformatics at the University of St Andrews. The workshop focused on exciting and applied uses of Geographic Information Science and GeoInformatics, and had a range of interesting talks on GIS for natural and social sciences, spatial analysis of movement, networks and digital humanities by Urska Demsar, Carson Farmer, Stewart Fotheringham, Paul Longley, Rob Wiebel, John Wilson and Keiji Yano.

June 2012: My work with Roger and Jo won third prize at the Nokia Data Challenge, from about 50 entries to the Open Challenge. I presented the work at the Nokia Data Challenge workshop, entitled "Visual Analysis of Social networks in Space and Time" [paper | video]. The work uses visual analytics to study social ties between participants and explores how these are embedded in time and space.

June 2012: I'm involved in an EPSRC- and DSTL- funded project, in which we're working with Middlesex and Loughborough Universities to develop methods for Data Intensive Visual Analytics. The project investigates visual approaches for understanding and communicating dynamic, uncertain and frequently conflicting data that are derived from numerous sources. We will develop methods for storing, communicating and utilising metadata about the data themselves and the processes used in their analysis and interpretation, focussing on issues such as data origin, data quality and analytical process. The methods will be applicable to domains that rely upon data intensive systems.

May 2012: Jo and I attended a workshop about visualising migration data in Einsiedeln near Zurich, Switzerland. It was organised by the Geography Department at the University of Zurich to bring researchers together from different disciplines, produce immediate outputs and discuss further collaboration. Outputs included a global county-to-country migration map, county-county migration in the Republic of Ireland, demographic data for migrants in Nepal and Kyrgyzstan, internal migration in the Ivory coast and nomad movement and polio outbreaks in Chad.

May 2012: I was invited to talk about visualising geodemographic data at the Launch of UCL's Crime, Policing and Citizenship project. Sessions included contributions about "Citizens and Identities", "Intelligent Policing and Crime Prevention" and "Spatio-Temporal Data Mining and Network Complexity".

March 2012: I participated in the MOVE meeting at Delft University of Technology along with researchers from across Europe with interests and different expertises in handling and analysing movement data. I presented the user-centred approach used in my Short Term Scientific Mission to Amsterdam last May. I also attended the pre-meeting workshop Urbanism on Track and presented his interactive graphics for exploring a dataset of human movements by different groups of people.

February 2012: I attended a Willis Research Network meeting on global flood and windstorm risk modelling, at which we discussed the research needs of the insurance industry. This culminated in a half-day seminar attended by over 200 participants from the insurance market. We have been a member of the Willis Research Network for four years, applying information visualisation to exploratory data analysis and risk communication.

2011

January 2012: We helped Leicestershire County Council collect over 3000 public views on the green spaces in Leicestershire.
The results are now in and you can explore them with an interactive map. Browse people's commments by area, by type of green space or by keyword and find out why citizens value their green spaces.

November 2011: I attended the Science of Risk conference at Lloyd's of London at which the Lloyd's Research Prize winners were announced. The Research Prize rewards existing published research with relevance to the insurance industry in five categories: natural hazards, climate change, biological and technological risks, behavioural risks and insurance operations and markets. My entry for work with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at Reading University was shortlisted for the natural hazards category.
October 2011: I attended VisWeek and presented the InfoVis paper Exploring Uncertainty in Geodemographics with Interactive Graphics. This joint work with Jason Dykes and Jo Wood designed visual and interactive techniques for exploring uncertainty within OAC (a geodemographic classifier) and then looked at the impact of providing this to expert users of OAC in a local authority. The paper is published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(12), pp2545-54.
October 2011: I presented our OAC Explorer work as part of UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis' seminar series. The work allows the classification uncertainty in a geodemographic classifier to be explored. The talk described the rationale behind the design decisions, highlighted some of the findings and described a small study assessing the impact of this upon users.
September 2011: I attended the VAW2011 workshop at UCL, organised by UKVAC, a consortium of UK universities working on Visual Analytics. Jo and Jason gave a talk each. I demonstrated OAC Explorer which uses interestive visualisation to study uncertainty and other variation within a geodemographic classifier Jason demonstrated PlaceSurvey which presents the results of a survey on public satisfactory with their local area carried out by Leicestershire County Council.
August 2011: I'm recording weather conditions using a weather station on the roof of our department. Live data are sent to Weather Underground and are displayed on my homepage.
July 2011: Our paper "Exploring Uncertainty in Geodemographics with Interactive Graphics" [see video] with Jason and Jo, has been accepted at InfoVis. The paper presents a design that uses interactive visualisation to let users to delve into a geodemographic classifier (OAC) to study uncertainty and the original data that drives the classifier, spatially and by category. We used an implementation of this design to assess the impact of providing expert users with the means to explore uncertainty in a classifier they already knew well. The paper will be presented at VisWeek in October and will appear in IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics 17(6).
July 2011: I co-authored a paper entitled "BallotMaps: Detecting Name Bias in Alphabetically Ordered Ballot Papers" with Jo, Jason and Donia, which finds evidence of voting bias related to the alphabetical ordering of names on ballot papers in local London elections. The paper was accepted at VisWeek, with be presented in October and will appear in IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics 17(6).
July 2011: I participated in a workshop that was part of the International Cartographic Association conference in Paris on Persistent Problems in GeoVisualization. An inspiring workshop where speakers presented their views on persistent problems in geographical visualisation and then discussed with the audience.
June 2011: I participated in a workshop at the Lorentz Center (Lieden, Netherlands) about the Analysis and Visualization of Moving Objects. Participants were from GIS, computational geometry, statistics and ecology. Issues of scale, scalability, sampling, context, clustering that affect the analysis and visualisation of such data were discussed, with a focus on animal tracking.

June 2011: I participated in EuroVis and the EuroVA workshop in Bergen, Norway and presented HiDE as an interactive demo in the poster session [abstract]. A variety of interesting papers on various topics were presented in this year's spectacular setting, including visualisation and analysis of spatiotemporal data, documents, flows, networks, biological data and parameter spaces.
May 2011: I spent two weeks with Emiel, Judy, Adriaan and Willem at the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. They are using GPS tracks of birds to better understand birds' behaviour and ecology. We designed, implemented and are evaluating novel techniques for visually analysing birds' movement, using a user-centred approach that focused on the ability to answer specific research questions previously difficult to investigate. The trip was funded by the EU COST-MOVE action.

April 2011: I attended the European Geophysical Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, contributing two posters: "Browsing large natural hazard event sets" [abstract] and "Sharing insights on the impact of natural disasters on Twitter" [abstract | poster].

March 2011: I attended the GeoViz 2011 workshop and presented work on designing interactive graphics for validating and interpreting storm track model outputs. We also presented work on visualising the distribution of bicycle hires and demonstrated HiDE through our vizTweet poster.

March 2011: We have released a new version of the Hierarchical Data Explorer (HiDE) that now supports 2D plots, has an applet version that runs from within a web browser and has a number of enhancements and bug-fixes.

March 2011: We're asking users to analyse data on socioeconomic impacts of natural disasters using HiDE (through the Earthquake-report website), sharing their finding through Twitter and then filling in a questionnaire about their experiences afterwards.Details are here. We plan to report our findings from this at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in April.

February 2011: Two maps that I designed with colleagues were shortlisted for the Journal and Maps' Best Map Award 2010 - Treemap Cartography for showing Spatial and Temporal Traffic Patterns and Rectangular Hierarchical Cartograms for Socio-Economic Data.

February 2011: I've designed an interactive web-based mapping tool with Leicestershire County Council that allows citizens to identify green spaces in the county that they value. It is part of a public consultation exercise which aims to give local communities a greater say in planning decisions that affect their area.

February 2011: I was awarded a Short Term Scientific Mission grant to spend two weeks at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam in May. I'll work with Emiel Van Loom and colleagues to help analyse their bird-tracking data, to help understand the nesting, feeding and migration behaviour of sea gulls.

January 2011: I participated in the MOVE meeting in Mons, Belgium. MOVE is an EU funded research network of expertise in representing, analysing and visualising data about moving objects.

2010

December 2010: We've released HiDE, software that lets you build information graphics from data and tweet them. Data can be explored changing the mapping of data variables to the visual variables of size, order and colour. Try out the example datasets we provide!

December 2010: I participated in the Eurostat Hackday in London which ran simultaneously with other in different European cities. We concentrated on EU energy data and used HiDE to explore data on energy consumption and renewable energy production in different EU countries over time which was written up on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog and the Guardian datablog. These data are now included in the HiDE download.

December 2010: Some of our OAC map work has featured on "Best of the Web" feature in the Telegraph, following its appearance in the same newspaper last August.

December 2010: I was awarded a Staff Research Prize for my work with the National Centre of Atmospheric Science that resulted in a high profile award, publicity for the university and the opportunities for further collaboration.

December 2010: Our placeSurvey exploratory interface was recently featured on the Information Aesthetics blog. It allows exploration of the satisfaction of the citizens of Leicestershire with their area and council, from a major survey that was carried out in 2008.

December 2010: I presented our work on map legend design to the Geography Department at the University of Zurich at a lunchtime seminar.

December 2010: I participated in a week-long workshop on handling and analysing moving object data at Schloss Dagstuhl. The workshop brought together geographers, computational geometrists and applied domain experts for an inspiring workshop that has provided new collaboration opportunities.

November 2010: Jo and I attended the AGI annual dinner to pick up our Best Paper at GISRUK award. The paper was coauthored with Jason Dykes and Robert Radburn.

October 2010: I've just come back from VisWeek in Salt Lake City, where I've co-authored a number of contributions and presented our "Making Hurricane Tracks Accessible" [link] Discovery Exhibition entry (with NCAS and WRN) and our "Tweeting Visualisations for Collaborative Analysis" [abstract | poster]. My colleagues and I picked up three awards.

October 2010: We have been given an honorable mention for our paper Rethinking Map Legends with Visualization at the InfoVis conference at VisWeek in Salt Lake City. The paper provides guidance for creating map legends for dynamic maps, based on cartographic and information visualisation literature and some workshops that we ran with EDINA. We built a number of prototypes to illustrate our guidelines, which are demonstrated in our video.

October 2010: Some of our recent work is now featured on the giCentre Vimeo channel.

October 2010: We have won the Discovery Exhibition Award for our "Making Hurricane Tracks Accessible" - joint work with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading through the Willis Research Network. The Discovery Exhibition showcases visualisation that has made a tangible impact on users. We describe the impact that interactive visualization is having on climate scientists and the insurance industry, by helping climate scientists validate their model of simulated storm tracks, generate research questions and disseminate this knowledge.

September 2010: Jason and I spent four days in Helsinki with researchers at Aalto University, developing means for visual analysis of their data on factors that affect how the 'happiness' of citizens. We identified questions they had of their data, implemented some novel techniques to help them answer these questions and will be evaluating how effective these are over the next couple of months.

August 2010: We won a prize for "good overall design and analysis" for our analytical visualisation of data relating to a virus pandemic (spatio-temporal spread and mutation). The annual VAST (Visual Analytics in Science and Technology) challenge provides a large simulated but realistic dataset (usually relating to issues of national security) and challenges participants to interpret the data using visual analytics.

August 2010: Our paper "Rectangular Hierarchical Cartograms for Socio-Economic Data" has just been published in the Journal of Maps [link]. Here, we describe and demonstrate how we've added geography into treemaps resulting in hierarchical cartograms that can depict both spatial and non-spatial hierarchies, using a geodemographic map of Britain at unit postcode.

August 2010: I've been involved with a number of contributions that have just been accepted at VisWeek 2010 in October: including one paper, one poster, two Discovery Exhibition entries and a prize for our VAST Challenge entry.

August 2010: I've produced some graphs of London's new bike hire scheme over the past 24 hours. Docking stations can by sorted by distance from any of the 300 or so docking stations in London. Interesting daily patterns can be seen - for example, commuting patterns between work and home/railway stations and where and when it is difficult to find a bike to hire.

July 2010: I attended the Ninth International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment at Leicester University and presented visual analysis techniques for comparing catastrophe (CAT) model outputs [pdf]. This was joint work with Willis as part of the Willis Research Network.

June 2010: The latest issue of the Cartographic Journal editorial describes our work as "an antidote to much of what we are seeing currently", and continues with "unless we see more like theirs, it is questionable whether an exhibition or television series in years to come will have much to say about the quality of the cartography of the start of the 21st century".

June 2010: Our paper "Visualisation of Origins, Destinations and Flows with OD Maps" has just been published in the Cartographic Journal which describes our new technique for visualising origin and destination data.

June 2010: Our transport mapping paper and map "Treemap Cartography for showing Spatial and Temporal Traffic Patterns" has just been published in the Journal of Maps. An interactive demo is also available.

May 2010: I presented our vizTweets project for collaborative visual data analysis for insurance natural hazard risk management at the European Geophysical Union General Assembly 2010 in Vienna.

April 2010: Best Paper and UKMap challenge award. I attended GISRUK and presented "OAC Explorer: Interactive exploration and comparison of multivariate socioeconomic population characteristics" [pdf] which won Best Paper and presented our winning entry "Aerial Photographs with Responsive Legends" [details] to the UKMap challenge.

March 2010: I've had my paper "Risk Management Collaboration and Discussion through Shared Interactive Graphics" [abstract] accepted for oral presentation at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in May.

March 2010: I've had my paper "Visual analysis of sensitivity in CAT models: Interactive visualisation for CAT model sensitivity analysis" [pdf] accepted for oral presentation at Accuracy 2010 in July.

February 2010: I attended the kick-off meeting for vizTweets, our VRERI JISC-funded project. I also attended the subsequent developer workshop, a stimulating collections of talks, challenges and discussion.

February 2010: Three GISRUK papers that I co-authored have been accepted: "OAC Explorer: Interactive exploration and comparison of multivariate socioeconomic population characteristics" [pdf], "Layout and Colour Transformations for Visualising OAC Data" [pdf] and "vizLegends: Re-Imagining Map Legends with Visualization" [pdf].

February 2010: I attended the Willis Research Network (WRN) quarterly meeting in London - a week of meetings with other WRN members, catastrophe (CAT) modelling companies, insurers, reinsurers and spatial data providers.

February 2010: I've just become a typesetter for the Journal of Maps.

January 2010: Jo, Jason and I won a university staff prize for our collaborative research outputs over the past year.

2009

December 2009: Jo, Jason and I won JISC funding for a 9 month project entitled 'vizTweets' in which we will be using HiVE for sharing interactive graphics using microblogging techniques for colloborative visual analysis.

November 2009: Jo and I attended the annual AGI awards dinner to receive our prize with Jason and Rob for the Best of GISRUK09 paper for our work on OD maps.

November 2009: I attended the Willis Research Network's annual reinsurance conference in Burmuda, presented examples of my research and met with some of the world's largest reinsurance companies.

October 2009: I attended VisWeek09, participated in a the VAST workshop, co-ran our tutorial and presented our paper Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions

September 2009: I visited Rob Radburn and Leicestershire County Council with Jo and Jason to discuss the Timely Information project.

August 2009: We (giCentre) won a prize for our entry to the VAST challenge.

August 2009: Our paper "Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions" has been given an "Honorable Mention" by the reviewing committee of the prestigious IEEE InfoVis conference, placing it in the top five papers present at this years conference.

August 2009: Jason, Jo and I delivered four digital prototypes to EDINA as part of the VizLegends project. These prototypes demonstrate and explore ideas for dynamic legends and data-dense legends for maps.

July 2009: Jo, Jason and I have had our paper "Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions" accepted to the prestigious IEEE InfoVis conference to be held in October in Atlantic City. The paper describes HiVE, a notation (see video) for exploring data through hierarchical layouts and will appear in Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Nov/Dec 2009).

July 2009: Jo, Jason and I have had our tutorial proposal "Exploring Design Decisions for Effective Information Visualization" accepted for IEEE VisWeek 2009. The tutorial - to be run in Atlantic City in October - explores the use of colour, layout, symbolism and animation for good data visualisation design.

July 2009: I presented at the Willis Global Clients' Day and discussed the role of data visualisation with some of the world's largest insurance and reinsurance companies.

July 2009: I gave two talks at our Data Visualisation Day about visualising spatiotemporal data, using seasonal climate forecasts and London house prices as case studies.

May 2009: Jason, Jo and I visited EDINA in Edinburgh to begin a small project on designing digital map legends in the context of spatial data provision.

April 2009: I attended the European Geophysical Union General Assembly (EGU conference) in Vienna and presented preliminary work with Willis on visualising spatio-temporal aspects of traffic, showing how this might relate to hailstorms. Using approaches such as these might help improve insurance loss models in which exposure varies temporally as well as spatially [pdf].

April 2009: Jo, Jason, Rob and I won Best Paper at the GISRUK conference for our paper 'OD Maps for Exploring Spatial Trajectories' [pdf]

April 2009: I attended the annual GISRUK conference and presented some collaborative work we did with Exeter University [pdf] and our entry for the mashup competition. [More details...]

March 2009: Jason, Jo and myself have won a prize in Google's "KML in Research" competition, in which we use KML to show seasonal climate forecasts for South America over a ten year period. This work is the result of collaboration between climate scientists at Exeter University, facilitated by the Willis Research Network. [More details...]

March 2009: I attended the GeoViz workshop in Hamburg with Jason and Rob and presented joint work on the role of order and layout in treemaps for exploring spatiotemporal data. [More details...]

March 2009: I attended the VisMaster Working group on spatiotemporal data aspects of visual analytics with Jason to help define a visual analytics research agenda for Europe.

February 2009: I attended the Willis Research Network Quarterly meeting in London and discussed the role of spatial analysis and visualisation with representatives of reinsurance companies.

2008

December 2008: Jonathan and I completed the final report for our role in the 3D Topo project, a two-year international project coordinated by Delft University of Technology.

December 2008: Attended the WRN Christmas seminar "Supercomputers, Climate Change and Catastrophe Modelling

December 2008: Jason, Jo and myself developed some interactive tools to explore data on books published over the past few centuries with colleagues from The Times newspaper. [More details...]

November 2008: I attended the Willis Research Network Quarterly meeting in Burmuda and discussed the role of spatial analysis and visualisation with representative of reinsurance companies.

November 2008: I attended the 3rd International Workshop on 3D Geo-Information in Soeul, South Korea, and presented some joint work with Jonathan.

October 2008: I attended the VisWeek conference in Columbus, Ohio, at which interesting and cutting edge research and ideas in infomation visualisation were presented across a range of application domains.

September 2008: I attended the Annual Royal Geographical Society conference, and presented work with Jason and Jo on"Mashup cartography for data exploration" paper in the "Maps as Methods" session on the role of cartography in a world of increasing map-based mashups.