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Visual Analytics of Online Communication
PhD Thesis Proposal Defence Title: "Visual Analytics of Online Communication" by Mr. Siwei FU Abstract: Increasing categories of electronic communication platforms, such as instant messaging, Email, forums, and the like, have facilitated communication and collaboration among people worldwide. A large amount of online communication data generated by these platforms is collected and has accumulated, providing opportunities for analysts to understand communication patterns and facilitate decision making. An example is that, MOOC forums are becoming central hubs where students are able to interact with instructional staff. The analysis of MOOC forum data is beneficial to understanding class dynamics and preparing courses for the next iteration. However, such analysis is challenging due to the large, complicated, and heterogeneous nature of online communication data. Information visualization has been proven effective in understanding enormous amounts of such data by turning it into visual representations to exploit the pattern recognition capabilities of the human visual system. In this thesis, we propose three advanced visual analytics systems for understanding online communication data in various domains. The first system, iForum, is designed to investigate the three interleaving aspects of MOOC forums, that is, users, posts, and threads, at different granularities. Second, we present visForum, a novel visual analysis system for interactively exploring, comparing, and tracking conversation groups in online forums. To validate the effectiveness and usefulness of the aforementioned two systems, we conducted case studies with domain experts for both systems and one user study for visForum. The third system that we propose is T-Cal, an interactive visualization system to understand team conversation data from different perspectives. This system has the potential to help analysts understand team collaboration strategies for modern team messaging platforms, such as Slack. Date: Friday, 11 May 2018 Time: 10:00am - 12:00noon Venue: Room 3494 lifts 25/26 Committee Members: Prof. Huamin Qu (Supervisor) Dr. Xiaojuan Ma (Chairperson) Dr. Pedro Sander Prof. Chiew-Lan Tai **** ALL are Welcome ****