Interests
I am looking forward to supervising projects in Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction.
Visualization is closely related to Data Science, and I have conducted work in visualization for health, which overlaps with Health Informatics.
My interests and expertise include personal visualization, sports visualization, visualization literacy,
health visualization, physical and tangible visualization, visualization of open source data and visualization on public and semi-public displays.
With my expertise laying at the intersection of Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction,
I am very interested in designing new interactions for visualizations,
understanding how people discover and learn interactions,
exploring new visualization mediums (e.g., physical, tangible, organic) and contexts (personal, artistic, for storytelling),
and investigating how visualization of (personal) data can affect people's self-reflection and behaviour.
Most of my projects are design-centred, including design studies, design space explorations, and tasks and requirements analysis.
Projects can also be more technology-centred, with a focus on implementation and technology (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches, wall displays).
Depending on the project, they can involve qualitative and/or quantitative evaluations.
I encourage all students to directly talk to me to discuss their ideas that relate to these broad areas, especially ideas you are passionate about.
Note that I will have a mixed approach to supervising students in their projects.
While there will still be individual meetings, I will favour group presentations and discussions to leverage other students' feedback and expertise.
These group meetings will happen regularly over the course of the projects, help you frame your research questions, and help you in organizing your thoughts and communicating your ideas on a regular basis.
Email me at charles.perin@city.ac.uk to set up a meeting.
Topics
Here is a list of research ideas I am particularly interested in.
All topics are pretty open, and you can decide the direction to take to adapt a research idea to your own interests.
Personal Visualization
More and more individuals collect data for their own. Personal data about health, fitness, travels, habits, activities, and so on.
The area of personal visualization is an emerging area in the visualization research community. The context, problems and challenges are very different from the ones in a professional context.
You can have a look at http://vis4me.com/ for a glimpse of what exists out there.
There are many aspects to personal visualization to explore, including:
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Reviewing the landscape of personal visualization, that is, how people collect data, what do they do with this data, and what could they do better.
Identifying current practices and designing prototypes will inform the design of future personal visualization tools.
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Privacy is an important challenge with personal data. Exploring the different levels of privacy, at different stages in the data acquisition, exploration, and communication are open problems.
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The importance of personal fitness and activity data has been growing at a face pace with the apparition of tracking devices such as Fitbit and smart watches and lifelogging tools.
There is an opportunity to go beyond the standard online dashboards that are used to present this data, and exploring new ways of visualizing and interacting with personal activity data, at the intersection of human-computer interaction, quantified self, personal informatics, health informatics, and information visualization.
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The particularities of personal visualization. Personal data visualization often expresses a message. We see more and more personal data art pieces, storytelling with personal data, and using data to craft everyday objects such as jewelry, posters, and clays.
This is a broad area and there are many different directions to explore, including aesthetics, enjoyment, and what makes visualizations relatable and engaging.
Beyond-Desktop Visualization
With new technological advances and their democratization, there are many opportunities for applying visualization in new contexts.
These new technologies also require designing new interaction modalities for interacting with visualizations. These include:
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Embedded / Situated Visualization on small devices such as smartphones and smart-watches, and visualization with Augmented/Virtual Reality technologies,
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Visualization in public / semi-public contexts, and the design of interactions for multi-touch collaborative environments, gestural interactions, and in-air interactions,
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Tangible / Physical Visualizations; there is a growing interest in information visualization and HCI for physical and tangible representations of data.
Interaction Discoverability and Visualization literacy
Visualization tools that go beyond simple charts are often difficult to discover and learn.
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While the relationship that people have to data is changing, one big challenge in visualization is the design of interactions and visualizations that people can discover.
This includes exploring affordances for visualizations and methods for assessing discoverability.
One possible approach is to survey tutorials in video games to inform the design space of interaction discoverability strategies for visualization.
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Interactions for visualizations have historically been designed with a desktop computer in mind and are still mainly designed with the WIMP paradigm in mind.
Research areas around interactions for visualizations include the design of new interactions for desktop visualizations (direct manipulation, embedded interaction),
and surveying standard and less standard approaches for interacting with data.
Perceptual Studies
Perceptual studies inform the design of visualizations by providing guidelines and recommendations regarding which visual encodings to use to represent which type of data.
Perceptual studies can help better understand, and sometimes model, human perception.
Such projects include a design exploration phase and an exploration of a design space; then designing, running, analyzing, and reporting experiments.
There are hundreds of opportunities for new perceptual studies, including:
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Encoding uncertainty,
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Encoding nominal (qualitative) data,
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Considering dependencies between intrinsic and extrinsic emphasis effects (as highlighted in this paper), and
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Better understanding how people perceive non-visual modalities (e.g., tactile, audio, smell) that represent data.
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A related project would be gathering the requirements, designing, and implementing a generic tool for performing online experiments.
Serendipitous Discoveries with Visualization
There are many opportunities for conducting research at the intersection of InfoVis, HCI and serendipity.
There is the opportunity to conduct projects under my supervision and with help from
Stephann Makri from the
Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design.
Stephann will bring his expertise in human-centred design and serendipity. These projects would aim at designing novel
visualization tools that support the discovery
of previously unknown connections (e.g. people, places that the user might want to speak to/visit that they might not otherwise have thought of).
It could be followed by a user-centred evaluation, focusing on the usability and usefulness of the tool,
as well as the potential unexpected and useful connections it facilitated.
There are many application areas that would fit this approach, including:
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Personal connections between people (e.g. using Facebook data),
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Professional connections between people (e.g. using LinkedIn data, publications data),
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Nearby places of interest (e.g. using Tripadvisor data, airbnb data),
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Cultural events of interest (e.g. using timeout.com data), and
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Movies and music collections (e.g., using imdb data).
While recommendation systems tend to be black boxes that offer linear views of similar movies, musicians, friends, and possibly related professional relationships,
these projects could delve into the use of visualizations that offer a personal experience, that are personalizable, and that favor serendipitous discoveries.
Visualization Applications
Visualization research can be conducted in almost any domain. Here are a few examples of challenging areas where visualization has been, or can be proven useful.
These topics usually involve design studies, prototyping, user-centred design, implementing and validating.
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Sports generate large amounts of data of increasing quality and quantity, that is used by journalists, analysts, and fans.
While sports data analysis has historically been the domain of data mining and statistics,
sports visualization offers new approaches to exploring, making sense of, and communicating sports data.
With this particular domain come new challenges that that range from visualization literacy to communication and storytelling to
designing visual analysis tools to visualizing multivariate, multidimensional, high-frequency data.
This research direction could include collaborations with sports experts/industry, field studies and interviews,
requirements analysis and fast prototyping, mixing data science, data mining, and visualization, geographic visualization and economics.
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Personal informatics, the quantified-self movement, and health informatics usually involve collecting and making sense of data.
Visualization is particularly well-suited to this context, which is often personal and aims at helping people making good, informed decisions.
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Bertifier v2. This project would involve improving the existing tool: http://bertifier.com/.
This visualization and data analysis tool is used by many people today and I have gathered a long list of requirements for a new version.
This project is more implementation-focused but still requires a lot of design skills, and an exploration of what an authoring and communication tool should support.
Organization
Students I will be advising will participate in a group practice.
Based on my experience working with graduate students, being part of a group helps in many ways individual progress.
The structure is still to be exactly determined, however, students I will advise can already anticipate that although there
will be a few individual meetings, most of the project discussions will happen in a group setting:
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Not only will you receive advices from me, you will also receive advices from your peers, adding as many perspectives to your project.
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Observing and critiquing the work from other students will provide you with alternatives, new perspectives and solutions to your own challenges -- favouring critical thinking.
It will also give you a good idea of the literature in several areas of information visualization and HCI and expand your knowledge.
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Group discussions and critique will foster reflection and critical thinking.
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Communication is a skill that every student will need in the future.
Group presentations will help you improve your professional presentation skills.
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By presenting your progress several times to the same group, you will work on framing your research questions and progress for an audience.
This will help refining the contributions and the storyline to be written in the final report.