Title: Visual Analytics for Urban Informatics and E-Learning

Speaker：Prof. Huamin Qu

Time: 2015-7-23 (Thursday), 2:00-3:00 PM

Venue: Building 5  Room #334, ISCAS

Bio:

Huamin Qu is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His main research interests are in visualization and computer graphics, with focuses on urban informatics, social network analysis, e-learning, and text visualization. His research has been recognized by many awards including 4 best paper/honorable mention awards, 2009 IBM Faculty Award, 2014 Higher Education Scientific and Technological Progress Award (Second Class) from the Ministry of Education of China, and 2015 HKICT Best Innovation (Innovative Technology) Silver Award from the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers. He is currently an associate editor of IEEE TVCG and is a paper co-chair for IEEE VIS'15. He was a paper co-chair for IEEE VIS'14, a program co-chair for IEEE PacificVis'11 and IEEE PacificVis'12, a conference co-chair for VINCI'11 and VINCI'12, and a program vice chair for ChinaGraph 2014. He obtained a BS in Mathematics from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, an MS and a PhD (2004) in Computer Science from the Stony Brook University.

Abstract:

Data visualization is widely considered a key to big data analytics and has become a hot topic recently. In Obama Government's big data initiative, it specially mentioned a US $2 million funding support to train undergraduates to use graphical and visualization techniques for complex data.  At 2013, Tableau Software, a company marketing interactive data visualization products, raised $254M in IPO and its market value reached almost 4 billion US dollars. Stories about data visualization and its roles in the big data era are covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, etc.

In this talk, I will first briefly introduce the history of data visualization, its main research problems and major approaches. I will then discuss the relationships between data visualization and related fields like data mining and human-computer interaction. After that I will talk about opportunities and challenges for data visualization research in the big data era. Finally I will present some novel visual analytics systems developed at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for urban big data and data collected from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). I will introduce VisMOOC (http://vis.cse.ust.hk/vismooc/)， an online-based  visual analytics system to help instructors analyze how students watch MOOC videos, how they interact with each other in the course forum, and the correlation between their performance and their learning behaviors.