New Course Announcement

cs5984: Information Visualization

Spring 2001,  CRN 15595, Computer Science
Instructor:  Dr. Chris North
Tues, Thurs 5:00PM - 6:15PM 
McBryde 209

The Information Revolution is upon us.  Virtual mountains of information are piling up and threatening to bury us.  Yet this valuable information hides in computer storage, where it is intangible, invisible, unknowable, and unusable.  When we seek it, we are overwhelmed with a core dump of data that we cannot possibly digest.  Have you ever wished you could somehow “see” inside your computer, to grasp information that it refused to show you?  Have you ever been frustrated by the enormous effort you must exert (Click, click, click, click, click, type, type, type…) to obtain information you needed?  Have you ever wondered how to increase the bandwidth of effective communication between computer and human, enabling us to see more, learn more, understand more, and accomplish more?  If so, then take cs5984, Information Visualization, and open your eyes to a new world where the invisible is revealed.

In this course, you will learn how to:

• Examine existing interactive visualization techniques from the research literature and tools from the trade;
• Design information visualizations for given data, users, and tasks;
• Prototype and implement visualizations, including supporting algorithms and data structures;
• Evaluate visualizations with empirical user studies.

Course text book:  Readings In Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, Edited by Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, January 1999, 712 pages, ISBN 1-55860-533-9.