A Time Travel interface for Data Exploration and Selective Undo/Redo

Speaker
Mark Derthick
Visiting Scientist/Project Scientist, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Wean Hall 5409

Description

An important component of exploratory data analysis is the ability to quickly develop and compare multiple scenarios. Yet today’s interfaces cannot represent alternative exploration paths as a branching history, forcing the user to recognize conceptual branch points in a linear history. Further, the interface can only show information from one state at a time, forcing the user to use her memory to compare scenarios.

The TimeTravel interface includes a tree-structured visualization for continuous navigation across time and scenarios. The visualization also allows browsing the history and selectively undoing/redoing events within a scenario or across scenarios. It uses the AI formalism of contexts to maintain multiple, possibly mutually inconsistent, knowledge base states. Cross-context formulas can be written for explicit scenario comparison, including visualizations of scenario differences.

Speaker's Bio

Mark Derthick is a Project Scientist in CMU’s Visualization and Intelligent Interfaces Lab. His interests include Human-Information Interaction, Visual Data Mining, and organization of personal or group multi-media data stream. In support of these interests he has developed a visual query language that is integrated into a direct manipulation data exploration environment. It uses data structures developed for data mining in order to maintain interactivity with datasets of up to a million objects. Previously Dr. Derthick worked at MCC on the Cyc large-scale common-sense knowledge base, building interfaces and applications. He earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon in 1988 for his thesis that connectionist models can do semantic reasoning, and that they are more robust than symbolic systems in the face of incomplete or inconsistent data.

Speaker's Website
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mad/index.html