arXiv subjects

Huamin Qu

Publications and source records attributed to Huamin Qu.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Is It the End? Guidelines for Cinematic Endings in Data Videos

Data videos are becoming increasingly popular in society and academia. Yet little is known about how to create endings that strengthen a lasting impression and persuasion. To fulfill the gap, this work aims to develop guidelines for data video endings by drawing inspiration from cinematic arts. To contextualize cinematic endings in data videos, 111 film endings and 105 data video endings are first analyzed to identify four common styles using the framework of ending punctuation marks. We conducted expert interviews (N=11) and formulated 20 guidelines for creating cinematic endings in data videos. To validate our guidelines, we conducted a user study where 24 participants were invited to design endings with and without our guidelines, which are evaluated by experts and the general public. The participants praise the clarity and usability of the guidelines, and results show that the endings with guidelines are perceived to be more understandable, impressive, and reflective.

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arXiv2023

NetworkNarratives: Data Tours for Visual Network Exploration and Analysis

This paper introduces semi-automatic data tours to aid the exploration of complex networks. Exploring networks requires significant effort and expertise and can be time-consuming and challenging. Distinct from guidance and recommender systems for visual analytics, we provide a set of goal-oriented tours for network overview, ego-network analysis, community exploration, and other tasks. Based on interviews with five network analysts, we developed a user interface (NetworkNarratives) and 10 example tours. The interface allows analysts to navigate an interactive slideshow featuring facts about the network using visualizations and textual annotations. On each slide, an analyst can freely explore the network and specify nodes, links, or subgraphs as seed elements for follow-up tours. Two studies, comprising eight expert and 14 novice analysts, show that data tours reduce exploration effort, support learning about network exploration, and can aid the dissemination of analysis results. NetworkNarratives is available online, together with detailed illustrations for each tour.

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arXiv2023

Notable: On-the-fly Assistant for Data Storytelling in Computational Notebooks

Computational notebooks are widely used for data analysis. Their interleaved displays of code and execution results (e.g., visualizations) are welcomed since they enable iterative analysis and preserve the exploration process. However, the communication of data findings remains challenging in computational notebooks. Users have to carefully identify useful findings from useless ones, document them with texts and visual embellishments, and then organize them in different tools. Such workflow greatly increases their workload, according to our interviews with practitioners. To address the challenge, we designed Notable to offer on-the-fly assistance for data storytelling in computational notebooks. It provides intelligent support to minimize the work of documenting and organizing data findings and diminishes the cost of switching between data exploration and storytelling. To evaluate Notable, we conducted a user study with 12 data workers. The feedback from user study participants verifies its effectiveness and usability.

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arXiv2023

DMiner: Dashboard Design Mining and Recommendation

Dashboards, which comprise multiple views on a single display, help analyze and communicate multiple perspectives of data simultaneously. However, creating effective and elegant dashboards is challenging since it requires careful and logical arrangement and coordination of multiple visualizations. To solve the problem, we propose a data-driven approach for mining design rules from dashboards and automating dashboard organization. Specifically, we focus on two prominent aspects of the organization: arrangement, which describes the position, size, and layout of each view in the display space; and coordination, which indicates the interaction between pairwise views. We build a new dataset containing 854 dashboards crawled online, and develop feature engineering methods for describing the single views and view-wise relationships in terms of data, encoding, layout, and interactions. Further, we identify design rules among those features and develop a recommender for dashboard design. We demonstrate the usefulness of DMiner through an expert study and a user study. The expert study shows that our extracted design rules are reasonable and conform to the design practice of experts. Moreover, a comparative user study shows that our recommender could help automate dashboard organization and reach human-level performance. In summary, our work offers a promising starting point for design mining visualizations to build recommenders.

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arXiv2023

Visual Analysis of Discrimination in Machine Learning

The growing use of automated decision-making in critical applications, such as crime prediction and college admission, has raised questions about fairness in machine learning. How can we decide whether different treatments are reasonable or discriminatory? In this paper, we investigate discrimination in machine learning from a visual analytics perspective and propose an interactive visualization tool, DiscriLens, to support a more comprehensive analysis. To reveal detailed information on algorithmic discrimination, DiscriLens identifies a collection of potentially discriminatory itemsets based on causal modeling and classification rules mining. By combining an extended Euler diagram with a matrix-based visualization, we develop a novel set visualization to facilitate the exploration and interpretation of discriminatory itemsets. A user study shows that users can interpret the visually encoded information in DiscriLens quickly and accurately. Use cases demonstrate that DiscriLens provides informative guidance in understanding and reducing algorithmic discrimination.

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arXiv2023

Anchorage: Visual Analysis of Satisfaction in Customer Service Videos via Anchor Events

Delivering customer services through video communications has brought new opportunities to analyze customer satisfaction for quality management. However, due to the lack of reliable self-reported responses, service providers are troubled by the inadequate estimation of customer services and the tedious investigation into multimodal video recordings. We introduce Anchorage, a visual analytics system to evaluate customer satisfaction by summarizing multimodal behavioral features in customer service videos and revealing abnormal operations in the service process. We leverage the semantically meaningful operations to introduce structured event understanding into videos which help service providers quickly navigate to events of their interest. Anchorage supports a comprehensive evaluation of customer satisfaction from the service and operation levels and efficient analysis of customer behavioral dynamics via multifaceted visualization views. We extensively evaluate Anchorage through a case study and a carefully-designed user study. The results demonstrate its effectiveness and usability in assessing customer satisfaction using customer service videos. We found that introducing event contexts in assessing customer satisfaction can enhance its performance without compromising annotation precision. Our approach can be adapted in situations where unlabelled and unstructured videos are collected along with sequential records.

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arXiv2023

Towards an Understanding of Distributed Asymmetric Collaborative Visualization on Problem-solving

This paper provided empirical knowledge of the user experience for using collaborative visualization in a distributed asymmetrical setting through controlled user studies. With the ability to access various computing devices, such as Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted displays, scenarios emerge when collaborators have to or prefer to use different computing environments in different places. However, we still lack an understanding of using VR in an asymmetric setting for collaborative visualization. To get an initial understanding and better inform the designs for asymmetric systems, we first conducted a formative study with 12 pairs of participants. All participants collaborated in asymmetric (PC-VR) and symmetric settings (PC-PC and VR-VR). We then improved our asymmetric design based on the key findings and observations from the first study. Another ten pairs of participants collaborated with enhanced PC-VR and PC-PC conditions in a follow-up study. We found that a well-designed asymmetric collaboration system could be as effective as a symmetric system. Surprisingly, participants using PC perceived less mental demand and effort in the asymmetric setting (PC-VR) compared to the symmetric setting (PC-PC). We provided fine-grained discussions about the trade-offs between different collaboration settings.

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arXiv2023

XNLI: Explaining and Diagnosing NLI-based Visual Data Analysis

Natural language interfaces (NLIs) enable users to flexibly specify analytical intentions in data visualization. However, diagnosing the visualization results without understanding the underlying generation process is challenging. Our research explores how to provide explanations for NLIs to help users locate the problems and further revise the queries. We present XNLI, an explainable NLI system for visual data analysis. The system introduces a Provenance Generator to reveal the detailed process of visual transformations, a suite of interactive widgets to support error adjustments, and a Hint Generator to provide query revision hints based on the analysis of user queries and interactions. Two usage scenarios of XNLI and a user study verify the effectiveness and usability of the system. Results suggest that XNLI can significantly enhance task accuracy without interrupting the NLI-based analysis process.

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arXiv2022

AniVis: Generating Animated Transitions Between Statistical Charts with a Tree Model

Animated transitions help viewers understand changes between related visualizations. To clearly present the underlying relations between statistical charts, animation authors need to have a high level of expertise and a considerable amount of time to describe the relations with reasonable animation stages. We present AniVis, an automated approach for generating animated transitions to demonstrate the changes between two statistical charts. AniVis models each statistical chart into a tree-based structure. Given an input chart pair, the differences of data and visual properties of the chart pair are formalized as tree edit operations. The edit operations can be mapped to atomic transition units. Through this approach, the animated transition between two charts can be expressed as a set of transition units. Then, we conduct a formative study to understand people's preferences for animation sequences. Based on the study, we propose a set of principles and a sequence composition algorithm to compose the transition units into a meaningful animation sequence. Finally, we synthesize these units together to deliver a smooth and intuitive animated transition between charts. To test our approach, we present a prototype system and its generated results to illustrate the usage of our framework. We perform a comparative study to assess the transition sequence derived from the tree model. We further collect qualitative feedback to evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of our method.

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arXiv2022

DashBot: Insight-Driven Dashboard Generation Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Analytical dashboards are popular in business intelligence to facilitate insight discovery with multiple charts. However, creating an effective dashboard is highly demanding, which requires users to have adequate data analysis background and be familiar with professional tools, such as Power BI. To create a dashboard, users have to configure charts by selecting data columns and exploring different chart combinations to optimize the communication of insights, which is trial-and-error. Recent research has started to use deep learning methods for dashboard generation to lower the burden of visualization creation. However, such efforts are greatly hindered by the lack of large-scale and high-quality datasets of dashboards. In this work, we propose using deep reinforcement learning to generate analytical dashboards that can use well-established visualization knowledge and the estimation capacity of reinforcement learning. Specifically, we use visualization knowledge to construct a training environment and rewards for agents to explore and imitate human exploration behavior with a well-designed agent network. The usefulness of the deep reinforcement learning model is demonstrated through ablation studies and user studies. In conclusion, our work opens up new opportunities to develop effective ML-based visualization recommenders without beforehand training datasets.

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arXiv2022

DPVisCreator: Incorporating Pattern Constraints to Privacy-preserving Visualizations via Differential Privacy

Data privacy is an essential issue in publishing data visualizations. However, it is challenging to represent multiple data patterns in privacy-preserving visualizations. The prior approaches target specific chart types or perform an anonymization model uniformly without considering the importance of data patterns in visualizations. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics approach that facilitates data custodians to generate multiple private charts while maintaining user-preferred patterns. To this end, we introduce pattern constraints to model users' preferences over data patterns in the dataset and incorporate them into the proposed Bayesian network-based Differential Privacy (DP) model PriVis. A prototype system, DPVisCreator, is developed to assist data custodians in implementing our approach. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with quantitative evaluation of pattern utility under the different levels of privacy protection, case studies, and semi-structured expert interviews.

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arXiv2022

Exploring Interactions with Printed Data Visualizations in Augmented Reality

This paper presents a design space of interaction techniques to engage with visualizations that are printed on paper and augmented through Augmented Reality. Paper sheets are widely used to deploy visualizations and provide a rich set of tangible affordances for interactions, such as touch, folding, tilting, or stacking. At the same time, augmented reality can dynamically update visualization content to provide commands such as pan, zoom, filter, or detail on demand. This paper is the first to provide a structured approach to mapping possible actions with the paper to interaction commands. This design space and the findings of a controlled user study have implications for future designs of augmented reality systems involving paper sheets and visualizations. Through workshops (N=20) and ideation, we identified 81 interactions that we classify in three dimensions: 1) commands that can be supported by an interaction, 2) the specific parameters provided by an (inter)action with paper, and 3) the number of paper sheets involved in an interaction. We tested user preference and viability of 11 of these interactions with a prototype implementation in a controlled study (N=12, HoloLens 2) and found that most of the interactions are intuitive and engaging to use. We summarized interactions (e.g., tilt to pan) that have strong affordance to complement "point" for data exploration, physical limitations and properties of paper as a medium, cases requiring redundancy and shortcuts, and other implications for design.

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arXiv2022

CohortVA: A Visual Analytic System for Interactive Exploration of Cohorts based on Historical Data

In history research, cohort analysis seeks to identify social structures and figure mobilities by studying the group-based behavior of historical figures. Prior works mainly employ automatic data mining approaches, lacking effective visual explanation. In this paper, we present CohortVA, an interactive visual analytic approach that enables historians to incorporate expertise and insight into the iterative exploration process. The kernel of CohortVA is a novel identification model that generates candidate cohorts and constructs cohort features by means of pre-built knowledge graphs constructed from large-scale history databases. We propose a set of coordinated views to illustrate identified cohorts and features coupled with historical events and figure profiles. Two case studies and interviews with historians demonstrate that CohortVA can greatly enhance the capabilities of cohort identifications, figure authentications, and hypothesis generation.

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arXiv2022

ShortcutLens: A Visual Analytics Approach for Exploring Shortcuts in Natural Language Understanding Dataset

Benchmark datasets play an important role in evaluating Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models. However, shortcuts -- unwanted biases in the benchmark datasets -- can damage the effectiveness of benchmark datasets in revealing models' real capabilities. Since shortcuts vary in coverage, productivity, and semantic meaning, it is challenging for NLU experts to systematically understand and avoid them when creating benchmark datasets. In this paper, we develop a visual analytics system, ShortcutLens, to help NLU experts explore shortcuts in NLU benchmark datasets. The system allows users to conduct multi-level exploration of shortcuts. Specifically, Statistics View helps users grasp the statistics such as coverage and productivity of shortcuts in the benchmark dataset. Template View employs hierarchical and interpretable templates to summarize different types of shortcuts. Instance View allows users to check the corresponding instances covered by the shortcuts. We conduct case studies and expert interviews to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the system. The results demonstrate that ShortcutLens supports users in gaining a better understanding of benchmark dataset issues through shortcuts, inspiring them to create challenging and pertinent benchmark datasets.

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arXiv2022

In Defence of Visual Analytics Systems: Replies to Critics

The last decade has witnessed many visual analytics (VA) systems that make successful applications to wide-ranging domains like urban analytics and explainable AI. However, their research rigor and contributions have been extensively challenged within the visualization community. We come in defence of VA systems by contributing two interview studies for gathering critics and responses to those criticisms. First, we interview 24 researchers to collect criticisms the review comments on their VA work. Through an iterative coding and refinement process, the interview feedback is summarized into a list of 36 common criticisms. Second, we interview 17 researchers to validate our list and collect their responses, thereby discussing implications for defending and improving the scientific values and rigor of VA systems. We highlight that the presented knowledge is deep, extensive, but also imperfect, provocative, and controversial, and thus recommend reading with an inclusive and critical eye. We hope our work can provide thoughts and foundations for conducting VA research and spark discussions to promote the research field forward more rigorously and vibrantly.

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arXiv2022

GestureLens: Visual Analysis of Gestures in Presentation Videos

Appropriate gestures can enhance message delivery and audience engagement in both daily communication and public presentations. In this paper, we contribute a visual analytic approach that assists professional public speaking coaches in improving their practice of gesture training through analyzing presentation videos. Manually checking and exploring gesture usage in the presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There lacks an efficient method to help users conduct gesture exploration, which is challenging due to the intrinsically temporal evolution of gestures and their complex correlation to speech content. In this paper, we propose GestureLens, a visual analytics system to facilitate gesture-based and content-based exploration of gesture usage in presentation videos. Specifically, the exploration view enables users to obtain a quick overview of the spatial and temporal distributions of gestures. The dynamic hand movements are firstly aggregated through a heatmap in the gesture space for uncovering spatial patterns, and then decomposed into two mutually perpendicular timelines for revealing temporal patterns. The relation view allows users to explicitly explore the correlation between speech content and gestures by enabling linked analysis and intuitive glyph designs. The video view and dynamic view show the context and overall dynamic movement of the selected gestures, respectively. Two usage scenarios and expert interviews with professional presentation coaches demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of GestureLens in facilitating gesture exploration and analysis of presentation videos.

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arXiv2022

Persua: A Visual Interactive System to Enhance the Persuasiveness of Arguments in Online Discussion

Persuading people to change their opinions is a common practice in online discussion forums on topics ranging from political campaigns to relationship consultation. Enhancing people's ability to write persuasive arguments could not only practice their critical thinking and reasoning but also contribute to the effectiveness and civility in online communication. It is, however, not an easy task in online discussion settings where written words are the primary communication channel. In this paper, we derived four design goals for a tool that helps users improve the persuasiveness of arguments in online discussions through a survey with 123 online forum users and interviews with five debating experts. To satisfy these design goals, we analyzed and built a labeled dataset of fine-grained persuasive strategies (i.e., logos, pathos, ethos, and evidence) in 164 arguments with high ratings on persuasiveness from ChangeMyView, a popular online discussion forum. We then designed an interactive visual system, Persua, which provides example-based guidance on persuasive strategies to enhance the persuasiveness of arguments. In particular, the system constructs portfolios of arguments based on different persuasive strategies applied to a given discussion topic. It then presents concrete examples based on the difference between the portfolios of user input and high-quality arguments in the dataset. A between-subjects study shows suggestive evidence that Persua encourages users to submit more times for feedback and helps users improve more on the persuasiveness of their arguments than a baseline system. Finally, a set of design considerations was summarized to guide future intelligent systems that improve the persuasiveness in text.

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arXiv2022

Misinformed by Visualization: What Do We Learn From Misinformative Visualizations?

Data visualization is powerful in persuading an audience. However, when it is done poorly or maliciously, a visualization may become misleading or even deceiving. Visualizations give further strength to the dissemination of misinformation on the Internet. The visualization research community has long been aware of visualizations that misinform the audience, mostly associated with the terms "lie" and "deceptive." Still, these discussions have focused only on a handful of cases. To better understand the landscape of misleading visualizations, we open-coded over one thousand real-world visualizations that have been reported as misleading. From these examples, we discovered 74 types of issues and formed a taxonomy of misleading elements in visualizations. We found four directions that the research community can follow to widen the discussion on misleading visualizations: (1) informal fallacies in visualizations, (2) exploiting conventions and data literacy, (3) deceptive tricks in uncommon charts, and (4) understanding the designers' dilemma. This work lays the groundwork for these research directions, especially in understanding, detecting, and preventing them.

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