COMP30750

This module is suitable for students interested in the fundamental and practical underpinnings of Information Visualisation. Information Visualisation is a research area that focuses on the use of graphical techniques to present data in an explicit form. Such static or dynamic presentations (pictures) help people formulate an understanding of data and an internal model of it for reasoning about. Such pictures of data are an external artifact supporting decision making. While sharing many of the same goals of Scientific Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design and Computer Graphics, Information Visualisation focuses on the visual presentation of data without a physical or geometric form. As such it relies on research in mathematics, data mining, data structures, algorithms, graph drawing, human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, semiotics, cartography, interactive graphics, imaging and visual design.

In this course we focus on major Information Visualisation research challenges which include:

* The ability to bring the human and computer together with interactive visualisations that couple the flexible pattern finding and adaptive decision-making human system with the computational power of networked computers coupled with their vast information resources.

* The ability to design a cognitively useful spatial mapping of a data set that is not inherently spatial.

* The ability to rely on the human visual system to perceive and process vast information and data sources.