Big Data in Pictures: Opportunities and Challenges for Data Visualization

Speaker:        Dr. Huamin QU
                Department of Computer Science and Engineering
                Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Title:          "Big Data in Pictures: Opportunities and Challenges for
                 Data Visualization"

Date:           Monday, 24 February, 2014

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Data visualization is widely considered a key to big data analytics and
has become a hot topic recently. In the 2012 press release of 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 three ongoing visualization
research projects conducted at the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology: 1) visualization of social media data like Twitter data; 2)
visualization of data collected from online education platforms like
Coursera; 3) visualization of trajectory data and air quality data for
urban informatics.


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Biography:

Huamin Qu is an associate 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. He is
currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization
and Computer Graphics (TVCG), a paper co-chair for IEEE VIS'14, and a
steering committee member of the IEEE Pacific Visualization Conferences
and the VINCI conferences. He has co-edited five special issues/sections
for various journals including a theme issue "Big Data Visualization" for
the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications at 2013. He received an
Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award at IEEE Visualization 2009, an IBM
Faculty Award at 2009, and a best paper award at the 13th International
Conference on Computer-Aided Design and Computer Graphics at 2013.
Students under his supervision have also received various awards including
the HKICT Best Innovation and Research Award, IBM PhD Fellowship Award,
and SENG PhD Research Excellence Award.  He obtained a BS in Mathematics
from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, an MS and a PhD in Computer Science
from the Stony Brook University.