Computer Science Colloquium

Hans-Jörg Schulz
University of Rostock, Germany

New Perspectives on Tree Visualization

Thu 09.02.2012, 10:00, 60 minutes
MT 132

Abstract

Many people in the information visualization and graph-drawing communities consider tree visualization a solved problem. Reasonably good tree layouts can be computed efficiently in terms of runtime and screen space utilization. In the course of the search for heuristics to generate ever-tidier tree layouts, the comparatively simple problem of transforming parent-child relationships into graphical representations has been solved over and over many times and is still the subject of information visualization research. Researchers have explored and published almost every way of arranging a tree's nodes in 2D and 3D; encoding them in different shapes or forms; and folding, unfolding, or otherwise interactively manipulating them. So, it is time to gain new perspectives on tree visualization. <br/> <br/> This talk will not only survey existing tree visualizations, but also provide insight in the principles that govern their design and which one should be conscious about when choosing a tree visualization or developing a new one. This comprehensive survey leads to insights about the design space of tree visualization as a whole and the talk will discuss current research endeavors to get a grip on this design space as a whole.

Bio

Hans-Jörg Schulz received his diploma (2004) and his PhD (2010) from the University of Rostock, Germany. At present, he is a post-doctoral researcher in a project on "Visual Support for the Analysis of hierarchically structured, multiple heterogeneous Data Sources" at the University of Rostock. Furthermore, he is associated with the DFG project "Visual Analytics and Stochastic Spatial Simulation for Cell Biology" in Rostock and an associated researcher at Graz University of Technology, Austria. His main interests concern the visualization of graphs and the adoption of graph visualization and analysis principles for non-graph structured data. In his free time, he maintains the tree visualization survey site at http://treevis.net.

Invited by Univ. Prof. Dr. Oliver Bimber, Institut für Computergrafik

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The Computer Science Colloquium is organized by the Department of Coputer Science at JKU, the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Informatik (ÖGI) and the Österreichische Computergesellschaft (OCG).

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