2nd IEEE Working Conference on
Software Visualization
Sep 29 - 30, 2014, Victoria, CA

Keynote Talk: Visualization for Software Analytics

Dr. Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey

Professor, Department of Computer Science

University of Victoria

 

 

 

 

Abstract

The popularity of software visualization research over the past 30 years has led to innovative techniques that are now seeing widespread adoption by professional software practitioners. But this research has barely kept pace with some of the radical changes occurring in software engineering today. In this talk, I explore current trends in software engineering, including the prevalence of software ecosystems and software delivery as a service, and the emergence of the social coder within a participatory development culture. I will also discuss how the field of software analytics has matured and seeks to support practitioners in improving software quality, user experience and developer productivity through data-driven tasks. Finally, I suggest that software visualization should be playing a bigger role in these recent trends, emphasizing that interactive visualizations are poised to play a critical role in the field of software analytics.

 

 

 

 

 

Bio

Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey is a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria and a Canada Research Chair in Human Computer Interaction for Software Engineering. Her research goal is to understand how technology can help people explore, understand and share complex information and knowledge. She applies and evaluates techniques from knowledge engineering, social software and visual interface design to applications such as collaborative software development, program comprehension, biomedical ontology development, and learning in web-based environments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keynote Talk: Visualization And Human Vision:  A Tale of Two Systems

 Dr. Ronald A. Rensink

Departments of Computer Science and Psychology

University of British Columbia

 

 

 

 

Abstract

This presentation will present some of the breakthroughs that have recently occurred in our understanding of human vision, and discuss how they might inform the design of more effective ways to visualize information.  For example, although it appears to us as observers that we always see everything in front of us, recent work in visual perception has shown that this is not true: observers can have great difficulty noticing changes that occur during a brief interruption or eye movement, even if these changes are large and the observer expects them.  This "change blindness" has formed the basis considerable research over the past decade into issues such as how much of a scene is remembered, what kinds of memory systems are involved, and what role is played by visual attention. Several of the highlights of this line of research will be discussed, including the proposal that scene perception is based on a dynamic "just-in-time" process, relying on a careful interplay between internal knowledge and external information.  It will then be argued that the operation of this system is similar in important ways to how humans access information via interactive visualization systems, and that this similarity can be the basis of insight into the limitations of visualization, as well as possible ways of overcoming these limitations.

 

 

 

 

 

Bio

Ronald A. Rensink is an Associate Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC).  His research interests include human vision (particularly visual attention), consciousness, visual design, and information visualization.  He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from UBC in 1992, followed by a postdoc in Psychology at Harvard University.  For several years he was a research scientist at Cambridge Basic Research, a lab sponsored by Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.  He returned to UBC in 2000, and is part of the UBC Cognitive Systems Program, an interdisciplinary program that combines Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology.  Since 2010, he has also been UBC Director of the Vancouver Institute for Visual Analytics (VIVA).