This year I had the pleasure to be accepted as a presenter at the InfoVis conference, part of the VisWeek, a IEEE conference, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I was pleased to take part to a conference with high quality papers and impeccable organization. The panels and workshops were also very good!
There was a particularly interesting workshop on Collaborative Visualization, organized by Petra Isenberg. It was mainly focus on co-located collaborative information visualization, considering the issues of multi-users interacting at the same time on shared surfaces, such as touch screens and walls (single touch and multi-touch). From my point of view the workshop was very interesting because it has addressed not only technical issues, but also the social side involved in collaboration. Secondly, it helped to spread the interest in collaborative visualization, a topic I’m very interested in, but is thus far not been explored much. The large attendance at the workshop (I suppose around 100 people, from my personal headcount) reassured and motivated me that there is rising interest in the topic.
The conference altogether was very technical, I think I have presented one of the very few papers that didn’t have an algorithm! In my talk I presented the results of my experiment on collaborative knowledge visualization (pdf, presentation, video)
However some of the workshops and panels were much more open to non-technical issues related to Info Vis.
I found very interesting also the panel on Changing the World with Visualization, where it was discussed how to diffuse the research findings to the world, such as in business, industries, education, media, etc.
Next year the conference will be in Salt Lake City, Utha (submission deadline: march 2010).
Sabrina Bresciani, Ph.D. 