Visual Analysis of Heterogeneous and Dynamic Graphs

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Visual Analysis of Heterogeneous and Dynamic Graphs"

by

Miss Panpan XU


Abstract:

Many real world problems can be modeled as heterogeneous graphs where nodes 
and/or links are of different types. And these graphs are often dynamically 
changing. One example is the bibliographic database, where authors and research 
topics are different types of entities, and the graph changes over time as the 
researchers switch their interests or form new collaborative relations. 
Research in the area of graph visualization has been concerned with designing 
novel and effective visual encoding schemes and user interactions for the 
viewers to gain insight into graph data. We follow this line of research and 
this proposal reports our work in developing visual analysis techniques for 
heterogeneous and dynamic graph data from various application domains.

In the first work, we visualize heterogeneous graph data that not only records 
the relationship among people, but also the various items they are related to 
(e.g. interested topics or music). We design visualizations that can help to 
study if people closely linked have similar items of interest, and introduce a 
novel set visualization technique and the corresponding layout algorithm to 
display the overlap of their interests. The techniques are applied to a 
bibliographic dataset and the user data from a social music service website.

The second work studies the dynamic interplay among topics, opinion leaders and 
the audiences on social media. More specifically, we propose a combination of 
time series modeling and interactive visualization techniques to study how 
various topics compete to attract public attention when they are spreading on 
social media (e.g. Twitter), and what roles do opinion leaders such as mass 
media, political figures and grassroots play in the rise and fall of various 
topics. In the experiment, we report the insights gained on collections of 
Tweets.

The third study proposes a visualization technique to explore network 
dynamics, especially how the new edges are formed through the assortative and 
relational mechanisms, which have been observed in the evolution of many 
networks. The visualization technique developed not only displays the 
structural evolution of a dynamic network, but also allows the viewer to 
explore the various mechanisms underlying the changes. The techniques are 
demonstrated through the visual analysis of real-world datasets: the 
co-authorship network and the user interaction graph on social websites.


Date:			Friday, 11 July 2014

Time:                   3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3501
                        lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Huamin Qu (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Pan Hui (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Prof. Cunsheng Ding


**** ALL are Welcome ****