Tamara Munzner
University of British Columbia
12:00 p.m., Friday, April 28, ITE 325B
Host: Prof. Penny Rheingans, rheingan@cs.umbc.edu
We present the TreeJuxtaposer and SequenceJuxtaposer visualization applications for comparing and browsing evolutionary trees and genomic sequences, respectively. These systems use the Focus+Context navigational metaphor of allowing users to fluidly stretch and shrink parts of the view, as if manipulating a rubber sheet with the borders tacked down. We introduce cognitive scalability to this approach by guaranteeing the visibility of landmarks at all times, so that users can stay oriented as they explore complex datasets. In our systems, landmarks can be regions of difference between datasets, or the results of a search, or user-chosen regions. This technique, which we call "accordion drawing," supports smooth realtime transitions between a big-picture overview and a drilled-down views that show details in context. Our new PRISAD infrastructure is highly scalable, allowing fluid realtime interaction with trees of several million nodes and multiple aligned sequences of up to 40 million total nucleotides.
Tamara Munzner received a BS in 1991 and a PhD in 2000 from Stanford. She was on the technical staff of The Geometry Center, a mathematical visualization research group at the University of Minnesota, from 1991 to 1995. From 2000 to 2002 she was a research scientist at the Compaq Systems Research Center in California. She has been an assistant professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Computer Science since 2002. Her current research interests are information visualization, graph drawing, dimensionality reduction, and interactive computer graphics.