Data analysis often involves the comparison of complex objects. With the ever increasing amounts and complexity of data, the demand for systems to help with these comparisons is also growing. Increasingly, information visualization tools support such comparisons explicitly, beyond simply allowing a viewer to examine each object individually. In this paper, we argue that the design of information visualizations of complex objects can, and should, be studied in general, that is independently of what those objects are. As a first step in developing this general understanding of comparison, we propose a general taxonomy of visual designs for comparison that groups designs into three basic categories, which can be combined. To clarify the taxonomy and validate its completeness, we provide a survey of work in information visualization related to comparison. Although we find a great diversity of systems and approaches, we see that all designs are assembled from the building blocks of juxtaposition, superposition and explicit encodings. This initial exploration shows the power of our model, and suggests future challenges in developing a general understanding of comparative visualization and facilitating the development of more comparative visualization tools.

Machine learning (ML) models are nowadays used in complex applications in various domains, such as medicine, bioinformatics, and other sciences. Due to their black box nature, however, it may sometimes be hard to understand and trust the results they provide. This has increased the demand for reliable visualization tools related to enhancing trust in ML models, which has become a prominent topic of research in the visualization community over the past decades. To provide an overview and present the frontiers of current research on the topic, we present a State‐of‐the‐Art Report (STAR) on enhancing trust in ML models with the use of interactive visualization. We define and describe the background of the topic, introduce a categorization for visualization techniques that aim to accomplish this goal, and discuss insights and opportunities for future research directions. Among our contributions is a categorization of trust against different facets of interactive ML, expanded and improved from previous research. Our results are investigated from different analytical perspectives: (a) providing a statistical overview, (b) summarizing key findings, (c) performing topic analyses, and (d) exploring the data sets used in the individual papers, all with the support of an interactive web‐based survey browser. We intend this survey to be beneficial for visualization researchers whose interests involve making ML models more trustworthy, as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in their search for effective visualization techniques suitable for solving their tasks with confidence and conveying meaning to their data.

Research in machine learning has become very popular in recent years, with many types of models proposed to comprehend and predict patterns and trends in data originating from different domains. As these models get more and more complex, it also becomes harder for users to assess and trust their results, since their internal operations are mostly hidden in black boxes. The interpretation of machine learning models is currently a hot topic in the information visualization community, with results showing that insights from machine learning models can lead to better predictions and improve the trustworthiness of the results. Due to this, multiple (and extensive) survey articles have been published recently trying to summarize the high number of original research papers published on the topic. But there is not always a clear definition of what these surveys cover, what is the overlap between them, which types of machine learning models they deal with, or what exactly is the scenario that the readers will find in each of them. In this article, we present a meta-analysis (i.e. a “survey of surveys”) of manually collected survey papers that refer to the visual interpretation of machine learning models, including the papers discussed in the selected surveys. The aim of our article is to serve both as a detailed summary and as a guide through this survey ecosystem by acquiring, cataloging, and presenting fundamental knowledge of the state of the art and research opportunities in the area. Our results confirm the increasing trend of interpreting machine learning with visualizations in the past years, and that visualization can assist in, for example, online training processes of deep learning models and enhancing trust into machine learning. However, the question of exactly how this assistance should take place is still considered as an open challenge of the visualization community.

This paper presents a user-centered design (UCD) process of an interface for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients for helping them to better manage their symptoms. The interface is designed to visualize symptom and medication information, collected by an Internet of Things (IoT)-based system, which will consist of a smartphone, electronic dosing device, wrist sensor and a bed sensor. In our work, the focus is on measuring data related to some of the main health-related quality of life aspects such as motor function, sleep, medication compliance, meal intake timing in relation to medication intake, and physical exercise. A mock-up demonstrator for the interface was developed using UCD methodology in collaboration with PD patients. The research work was performed as an iterative design and evaluation process based on interviews and observations with 11 PD patients. Additional usability evaluations were conducted with three information visualization experts. Contributions include a list of requirements for the interface, results evaluating the performance of the patients when using the demonstrator during task-based evaluation sessions as well as opinions of the experts. The list of requirements included ability of the patients to track an ideal day, so they could repeat certain activities in the future as well as determine how the scores are related to each other. The patients found the visualizations as clear and easy to understand and could successfully perform the tasks. The evaluation with experts showed that the visualizations are in line with the current standards and guidelines for the intended group of users. In conclusion, the results from this work indicate that the proposed system can be considered as a tool for assisting patients in better management of the disease by giving them insights on their own aggregated symptom and medication information. However, the actual effects of providing such feedback to patients on their health-related quality of life should be investigated in a clinical trial.

Fig. 1: Logical timeline and clustered logical timeline views from Ravel, a tool for visualizing parallel execution traces. Events are represented by boxes, colored by their wall-clock delay. The use of logical time reveals communication patterns and leverages developers' understanding of their program's structure. We use the logical time structure to cluster on any metric, which allow us to represent large-scale traces using explorable clusters while still depicting messages with full timelines for a subset of processes.Abstract-With the continuous rise in complexity of modern supercomputers, optimizing the performance of large-scale parallel programs is becoming increasingly challenging. Simultaneously, the growth in scale magnifies the impact of even minor inefficiencies -potentially millions of compute hours and megawatts in power consumption can be wasted on avoidable mistakes or sub-optimal algorithms. This makes performance analysis and optimization critical elements in the software development process. One of the most common forms of performance analysis is to study execution traces, which record a history of per-process events and interprocess messages in a parallel application. Trace visualizations allow users to browse this event history and search for insights into the observed performance behavior. However, current visualizations are difficult to understand even for small process counts and do not scale gracefully beyond a few hundred processes. Organizing events in time leads to a virtually unintelligible conglomerate of interleaved events and moderately high process counts overtax even the largest display. As an alternative, we present a new trace visualization approach based on transforming the event history into logical time inferred directly from happened-before relationships. This emphasizes the code's structural behavior, which is much more familiar to the application developer. The original timing data, or other information, is then encoded through color, leading to a more intuitive visualization. Furthermore, we use the discrete nature of logical timelines to cluster processes according to their local behavior leading to a scalable visualization of even long traces on large process counts. We demonstrate our system using two case studies on large-scale parallel codes.

Background: Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are a very most common type of infection worldwide, and result in billions of dollars in medical care costs. Escherichia coli is the infective agent for 80–90% of all UTIs. Green tea, derived from leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant has been shown to have various potential health benefits (e.g., cardiovascular disease and cancer). The major beneficial components of green tea have been characterized, and are now known to be polyphenolic catechins. The main catechins in green tea are (-)-epicatechin-3-gallate, (-)-epigallocatechin (EGC), (-)-epicatechin, and (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG). EGCG and EGC have been shown to have the greatest antimicrobial effects, but only EGC has been shown to be excreted in urine. Isolates of E. coli from UTIs collected between 2007 and 2008 were characterized for antimicrobial resistance to standard drugs. Then 80 of these isolates, representing a wide spectrum of antimicrobial susceptibility patterns, were selected for testing using an extract of green tea.Results: The concentrations of green tea extract tested were 0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 mg/ml. All of the strains tested, except one, had minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of ≤4.0 mg/ml (99%), with 94% of the isolates having an MIC of ≤3.5 mg/ml, 76% of the isolates having an MIC of ≤3.0 mg/ml, 40% of the isolates having an MIC of ≤2.5 mg/ml. Two control strains varied in susceptibility, one having an MIC of ≤2.5 mg/ml,and the other having an MIC of ≤3.5 mg/ml.Conclusion: Since EGC has been shown to have antimicrobial effects on E. coli, and EGC has been shown to be excreted in the urine in a high enough concentration to potentially be effective as an antimicrobial; these MIC results suggest that ingesting green tea could have potential antimicrobial effects on UTIs caused by E. coli.

Abstract-Optimizing memory access is critical for performance and power efficiency. CPU manufacturers have developed sampling-based performance measurement units (PMUs) that report precise costs of memory accesses at specific addresses. However, this data is too low-level to be meaningfully interpreted and contains an excessive amount of irrelevant or uninteresting information.We have developed a method to gather fine-grained memory access performance data for specific data objects and regions of code with low overhead and attribute semantic information to the sampled memory accesses. This information provides the context necessary to more effectively interpret the data. We have developed a tool that performs this sampling and attribution and used the tool to discover and diagnose performance problems in real-world applications. Our techniques provide useful insight into the memory behavior of applications and allow programmers to understand the performance ramifications of key design decisions: domain decomposition, multi-threading, and data motion within distributed memory systems.

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