Drowning in Data

John StaskoInformation Interfaces Research GroupCollege of Computing / GVU CenterGeorgia Institute of Technology

July 2001

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Information Explosion

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Situation

Increasing amount of data (helpful & not helpful) is becoming availableInternet and WWW have radically increased people’s access to data

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How much data?

Between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique info produced per year

1000000000000000000 (1018) bytes250 meg for every man, woman and childPrinted documents only .003% of total

Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, 2000Cal-Berkeley, Info Mgmt & Systemswww.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info

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Problem

More data should be helpful but…often becomes a negative insteadMakes it difficult to find what one really wants,complicates browsingSheer amount can intimidate,and can make peoplereluctant to “dive in”

R. S. Wurman

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Gas on the Fire

Pervasive/Ubiquitous computingMany potential benefits, but sensors and computers everywhere will just produce more data

You’re runningout of milk!

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Big HCI Challenge

Difficult problems: Enabling access to the “right data” Empowering people to browse, filter, search, compare, contrast, summarize, …Leveraging what people do best

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Promising DirectionInformation Visualization

Providing techniques and tools for transforming data (raw text and numbers) into information (understanding, insight) thus making it useful to people

www.smartmoney.com/marketmapLondon subway - Harry Beck

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My Research Group

Information InterfacesHelping people address the explosion of data through a variety of waysEvaluation is a key component in all workSome example projects...

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Browsing Hierarchies

Lamping & Rao

Hyperbolic tree

Treemap

Shneiderman & Johnson

SunBurst

Visualizing fileand directorystructures

Root dir atcenter

Color-file typeAngle-file/dir size

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SunBurst Negative

Small peripheral filesdifficult to examineand distinguish

Solution: Use animated zoomingtechniques to showfocus + context(dynamic fisheye)

examples

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Information Art

Conveyingperipheral awarenessinformationthroughpersonalizedambientartisticvisualizations

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Anthropomorphic UIs

Need to better understandif and where such UIs canbe helpful and useful

Very controversial

(Folks around here have some experience with these UIs)

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Approach

Conducting series of Wizard of Oz empirical studies to gauge usefulness and people’s impressionsKey factors/variables

Agent characteristicsUser characteristicsTask

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Other Projects

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Conclusion

Proper focus:

Find ways to help people use informationnot

Technology for technology’s sake

HCI, not HCI

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For More Information...

www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii