4 September/October 2016 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1716/16/$33.00 © 2016 IEEE

About the Cover Editor: Mike Potel

Outstanding DesignGary Singh

As a fulltime visualization scientist at the Paci� c Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Dustin Arendt recently captured

top honors at the IEEE International Data Vi-sualization Contest. Sponsored by the IEEE Vi-sualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC), the competition recognizes outstand-ing design in visualization and visual analytics from around the globe. The theme of this year’s contest was spatiotemporal visual analytics, and Arendt’s use of storyline visualization to explore gender discrepancies in engineering and com-puter science took home � rst prize for overall excellence.

In graduate school, Arendt says he got his feet wet designing algorithms for large-scale so-cial network analysis. The beauty of the natural world—chaos, fractals, self-organizing systems—began to pique his research interests.

“My fascination in the occasionally simple ex-planation for complex emergent patterns found in nature led me on a track of researching complex systems,” he says. “My dissertation ended up be-ing about searching for simple explanatory models that exhibited interesting complex behavior.”

Much of this work, Arendt says in retrospect, might have originated during his undergraduate years when he read Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media, 2002), in which the author argues that everything in the universe is a computation.

“I owe a lot of the inspiration for this research to Stephen Wolfram and his book, which I had read several years earlier, as a freshman or sopho-more in college,” he says.

Once Arendt arrived at the Air Force Research Lab to do his postdoc work, he was able to combine his previous research in complex systems with his

05:30 06 PM 06:30 07 PM 07:30 08 PM 08:30 09 PM 09:30

Hideki Cocinaro Hideki Cocinaro

Inga Ferro Inga FerroLoreto Bodrogi Loreto Bodrogi

Isia Vann

Isia Vann

Stenig Fusil Stenig Fusil

Hennie Osvaldo

Hennie Osvaldo

Kanon Herrero Kanon HerreroVarja Lagos Varja Lagos

Minke Mies

Minke Mies

Felix Resumir Felix Resumir

Edvard Vann Edvard Vann

Orhan Strum

Orhan Strum

Ingrid Barranco

Ingrid Barranco

Ada Campo-Corrente

Ada Campo-Corrente

Willem Vasco-Pais

Willem Vasco-Pais

Figure 1. Storyline visualization generated for the 2014 IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge. The IEEE VAST Challenge data involved a hypothetical scenario in which executives from a � ctitious company had gone missing.

© 2

016

PNN

L

g5atc.indd 4 8/22/16 3:55 PM

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 5

passion for computer graphics and visualization. That naturally led to his focus on dynamic net-work visualization. From there, the seeds were planted for his current work at PNNL.

Storyline VisualizationThe cover image and Figure 1 are two different visualizations of the same data. The cover is more aesthetically oriented, while Figure 1 depicts the user experience (UX) designed version. The proj-ect, as well as the one that produced the contest-winning graphic (see Figure 2), were part of PNNL’s Analysis in Motion Initiative, an internally funded portfolio. Arendt was the principal investigator.

The research for the contest-winning graphic was conducted over a year ago and then entered in the IEEE Data Visualization Contest. At the time, storyline techniques were still new methods for analyzing how data changes over time. In this case, Arendt and his team explored gender dis-crepancies in computer science and engineering. They visualized the relationships between gender, test scores, and which college majors the students eventually chose.

“The challenge with storylines is that ‘showing relative change’ is not well defined, so there are many different design criteria that you could use to create storyline visualizations,” Arendt says. “It turns out that for many of these design criteria you need some kind of highly complex optimiza-tion algorithm to find a good layout.”

Since then, Arendt and his team have improved the storyline techniques and applied them to new types of data and additional user studies. The data represented by the new techniques (see the cover and Figure 1) originated with the 2014 IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge (www.vacommunity.org/VAST+Challenge+2014). In this case, the competition featured a hypo-thetical scenario in which executives from a ficti-tious company had gone missing, and it was the scientist’s job to analyze the missing employees’ movements, business transactions, and/or driving habits during the weeks prior to their disappear-ance to help law enforcement find them.

“The visualization uses storylines to show the relationship between employees over time in terms of their geospatial movements,” Arendt explains. “If two people’s vehicles are in roughly the same place at the same time, their storylines are drawn in the same layer for that time period.”

Unlike artists, scientists usually refrain from claiming “unconscious” inspiration, but Arendt admits that Web comics depicting narratives of how movie characters interact over time may have also influenced his work. In particular, XKCD, a Web-based comic book, at least partly inspired the idea for Arendt’s storyline visualization. In one particular issue, the comic deftly visualized char-acter interactions over time in various films, in-cluding Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and 12 Angry Men. In the diagram (see http://xkcd.com/657/),

Figure 2. First place winner at the IEEE International Data Visualization Contest. Dustin Arendt and his team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory use storyline visualization to explore gender discrepancies in engineering and computer science.

© 2

016

PNN

L

g5atc.indd 5 8/22/16 3:56 PM

6 September/October 2016

About the Cover

the horizontal axis represents time, while the ver-tical groupings indicates which characters are to-gether at any given time in each film. It is quite a read.

“I can’t directly attribute my idea of repre-senting dynamic networks with storylines to the XKCD comic, but it’s highly likely that I had seen it before and it provided some inspiration at a sub-conscious level,” Arendt admits, adding that the comic provided a great example of showing how things change over time.

“What makes storylines special is that they show many things changing relative to each other,” Ar-endt continued. “This is in stark contrast to sta-tistical time-series plots, where one might naively plot some derived value of the things we’re inter-ested in over time on the same axes.”

Future ConsiderationsAs a relatively new field of research, storyline vi-sualization probably requires additional scientific finesse. Much more work still needs to be done. Arendt says he’s plowing through a number of problems. For one, storyline visualizations don’t scale very well.

“The first few algorithms developed were really slow and produced pretty ugly drawings—a far cry from the beautiful Web comic,” he says. “Faster and better algorithms exist now, but the tech-nique, in general, doesn’t work well when we have lots of lines or many time steps.”

One can easily envision other manifestations in which these techniques are generalized for the mainstream, nonscientific community and/or in-corporated into much larger visual and analytical systems. Not much in this regard has really been done yet, given that most data isn’t storyline visu-alization friendly. Arendt is currently focusing on such challenges.

“A fast, open source JavaScript library for story-line visualization would allow the technique to re-ally take hold outside the research community and get used everywhere, including industry or even data journalism,” Arendt says.

Gary Singh lives and writes in San Jose, California.

Selected CS articles and columns are also available

for free at http://ComputingNow.computer.org.

Experimenting with your hiring process?Finding the best computing job or hire shouldn’t be left to chance.IEEE Computer Society Jobs is your ideal recruitment resource, targetingover 85,000 expert researchers and qualified top-level managers in softwareengineering, robotics, programming, artificial intelligence, networking andcommunications, consulting, modeling, data structures, and other computerscience-related fields worldwide. Whether you’re looking to hire or be hired,IEEE Computer Society Jobs provides real results by matching hundreds ofrelevant jobs with this hard-to-reach audience each month, in Computermagazine and/or online-only!

http://www.computer.org/jobs

The IEEE Computer Society is a partner in the AIP Career Network, a collection of online job sites for scientists, engineers, andcomputing professionals. Other partners include Physics Today, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), AmericanAssociation of Physics Teachers (AAPT), American Physical Society (APS), AVS Science and Technology, and the Society of PhysicsStudents (SPS) and Sigma Pi Sigma.

IEEE_half_horizontal_Q6:Layout 1 4/21/11 4:21 PM Page 1

g5atc.indd 6 8/22/16 3:56 PM