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A Beautiful WWW |
Information Retrieval. Information Visualization. Data Mining. Artificial Intelligence. Web Programming. (by Todd Holloway)
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- 20 Useful Visualization LibrariesSeptember 8 2008
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Well, not entirely limited to libraries. Useful stuff for visualization practitioners sounded a little non-specific, though. These are all freely available.
1. Prefuse (Java) & FLAIR (Flex)
2. simile (AJAX)
3. Processing
- Network Visualization for Systems BiologyMay 29 2008
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This is a quick look at the state-of-the-art of network visualization in systems biology. It’s an interesting topic on its own (and my day job at the moment), and also as it relates to the visualization of other types of networks, such as social networks (think Facebook). Systems biology is all about looking at proteins, pathogens, and more, within the contexts in which they interact. Naturally, then, the visualizations that tend to be particularly useful are those such as network visualizations that can provide macro understanding of the interactions. Questions such visualizations help with include those of the form “if a drug affects protein X, what else will it affect?” The Networks
Quite a bit of interesting complexity is present in these interaction networks (the data). They are often small-world, disassociative (unlike social networks), - A Look at FINVIZ.com (Financial Visualizations)May 12 2008
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FINVIZ is a suite of free financial tools that takes advantage of modern visualization ideas. The infoviz and interaction designs are certainly worth a blog post. Here’s a look at their efforts…
1. Sector Visualization. This visualization is a treemap implemented using the Google Maps API. It shows how well sectors and companies (stocks) within those sectors are doing. The attention to detail is exceptional. The company name stays the same size on zoom, and is dual encoded using a background image. The gain/loss is shown using shades of green/red, and is also dual encoded using text. On mouseover details are provided in a side panel.
- 5 Reasons Visualization Is Not More PrevalentApril 20 2008
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Why does it seem I have to look hard to find good data visualization examples? Why do few tech companies devote resources to visualization (Google’s the obvious exception)? Why are there relatively few job postings for visualization, with many of those there are requiring mainly graphic design skills and not data visualization skills? I was thinking about this today and I came up with a few possible reasons, some based on perceptions, and others based on marketplace realities.
Reason #1: People Don’t Know What Data Visualization Is
People don’t know what data visualization is. Don’t believe me? Read the Amazon.com reviews for the book Data Visualization by Ben Fry. They contain negative comments such as “One would expect a book with the title ‘Visualizing Data’ to be crammed with pictures”. The is
- Haugeland’s AI Views 25 Years LaterApril 13 2008
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A couple of years ago, I picked John Haugeland’s Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea up off the free book table in the computer science department of Indiana University. Finally read it this weekend. Published in 1985, there’s a lot to like about the book, but its definitely a product of its time. That period being when computer and cognitive scientists were obsessing about knowledge representation. Wanted to call-out a few (perhaps arrogant) quotes reflective of its day…
“A different pipedream of the 1950s was machine translation of natural languages. The idea first gained currency in 1949 (via a ‘memorandum’ circulated by mathematician Warren Weaver) and was vigorously pursed … Weaver actually proposed a statistical solution based on the N nearest words (or nouns) in the immediate context. … Might a more sophisticated ’statistical semantics’ (Weaver’s own phrase) carry the day? Not a chance.”
