IEEE International Symposium on Big Data Visual Analytics 2015
12 Oct 2015

Everyone seems to know what ‘Big Data’ is. However, very few people are aware about ‘visual analytics’. So what is visual analytics? Visual analytics is analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.

At BDVA 2015, organized at CSIRO Hobart, 4 keynote speakers presented various visual analytics techniques used to facilitate the analysis of big data. One very interesting keynote speaker was Prof. Alferd Inselberg from the Tel Aviv University. Prof. Inselberg presented his work on using parallel coordinates to visualize and analyse multi-dimensional data sets. One of his examples was of particular interest. He used parallel coordinates to discover correlation between the interest rates of different European countries, currency exchange rates and world-wide gold price. Using parallel coordinates he was able to ‘uncover’ interesting and significant global trends.

Prior to Prof. Inselberg keynote speech, Julian Heinrich and Timos Kipouros conducted a workshop on parallel coordinates. Julian, a postdoctoral fellow with CSIRO, briefly presented the basic geometry of the parallel-coordinate system, how to read the resulting visual patterns, and investigated some of the most important interaction techniques to find these patterns. Timos, a research associate at the University of Cambridge, demonstrated how to use parallel coordinates for the analysis of engineering optimisation data, and how to support the decision making progress.

My presentation on Friday morning for our paper Visual fingerprints of the acoustic environment: The use of acoustic indices to characterise natural habitats (link) went well.

After the symposium, I spent a few days in the beautiful city Hobart. Salamanca Markets near the CSIRO Hobart centre is a must visit in Hobart. Don’t forget to try Hobart’s unique Valhalla ice-cream. Hobart is also known for its fresh sea food, beautiful gardens, lovely historical buildings and scenery and of course, MONA (Museum of Old and New Art).