A Survey on Understanding Misleading Visualization, Automatic Detection, and Prevention

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Understanding Misleading Visualization, Automatic 
Detection, and Prevention"

by

Mr. Yu Ho LO


Abstract:

Visualizations such as charts and graphs are used as a rhetorical device 
in news, blogs, and social media to support and further strengthen the 
message conveyed to the audience. Research shows the persuasive power of 
visualization. With equivalent information, the existence of a 
visualization – compared to a table – in an article has a significant 
effect on changing or reinforcing the reader's attitude toward the 
concerned matter. Misinformation on the Internet is a big challenge to 
every society that relies heavily on the Internet. It becomes more often 
that charts are included in the dissemination of misinformation. The study 
of misinformation on the Internet focuses on textual contents but rarely 
concerns the associated visual graphics.

This survey looks into the current state of the art in automatic detection 
and prevention of misleading visualization. The efforts of the pioneers 
start from collecting misleading visualization to confirm their existence. 
Then, researchers further conducted perceptual experiments to verify the 
misleading effects in human perception and reasoning. Automatic detection 
of misleading visualization is a recent development in visualization 
research.

Build upon the groundwork of understanding, the recent breakthrough on the 
detection methods of misleading visualizations makes it possible to 
develop prevention mechanisms like automatic correction suggestions and 
in-situ annotations. However, further development of this research 
direction requires benchmarks to compare the performance of different 
detection and correction methods. Besides, the current detection methods 
cannot be applied directly on bitmap images which is the most common 
format of misleading visualizations circulating on the Internet.


Date:			Monday, 6 December 2021

Time:                  	3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:			Room 4472
 			(lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Prof. Huamin Qu (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Pedro Sander (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
 			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma


**** ALL are Welcome ****