Five years after the first state-of-the-art report on Commercial Visual Analytics Systems we present a reevaluation of the Big Data Analytics field. We build on the success of the 2012 survey, which was influential even beyond the boundaries of the InfoVis and Visual Analytics (VA) community. While the field has matured significantly since the original survey, we find that innovation and research-driven development are increasingly sacrificed to satisfy a wide range of user groups. We evaluate new product versions on established evaluation criteria, such as available features, performance, and usability, to extend on and assure comparability with the previous survey. We also investigate previously unavailable products to paint a more complete picture of the commercial VA landscape. Furthermore, we introduce novel measures, like suitability for specific user groups and the ability to handle complex data types, and undertake a new case study to highlight innovative features. We explore the achievements in the commercial sector in addressing VA challenges and propose novel developments that should be on systems' roadmaps in the coming years.

This paper investigates a method for semantic segmentation of small objects in terrestrial LIDAR scans in urban environments. The core research contribution is a hierarchical segmentation algorithm where potential merges between segments are prioritized by a learned affinity function and constrained to occur only if they achieve a significantly high object classification probability. This approach provides a way to integrate a learned shape-prior (the object classifier) into a search for the best semantic segmentation in a fast and practical algorithm. Experiments with LIDAR scans collected by Google Street View cars throughout ∼100 city blocks of New York City show that the algorithm provides better segmentations and classifications than simple alternatives for cars, vans, traffic lights, and street lights.

Connectomics has recently begun to image brain tissue at nanometer resolution, which produces petabytes of data. This data must be aligned, labeled, proofread, and formed into graphs, and each step of this process requires visualization for human verification. As such, we present the BUTTERFLY middleware, a scalable platform that can handle massive data for interactive visualization in connectomics. Our platform outputs image and geometry data suitable for hardware-accelerated rendering, and abstracts low-level data wrangling to enable faster development of new visualizations. We demonstrate scalability and extendability with a series of open source Web-based applications for every step of the typical connectomics workflow: data management and storage, informative queries, 2D and 3D visualizations, interactive editing, and graph-based analysis. We report design choices for all developed applications and describe typical scenarios of isolated and combined use in everyday connectomics research. In addition, we measure and optimize rendering throughput-from storage to display-in quantitative experiments. Finally, we share insights, experiences, and recommendations for creating an open source data management and interactive visualization platform for connectomics.

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