We are again co-organizing the track International Symposium Visual Analytics and Data Science (VA) at the next International Information Visualisation Conference (iV 2022) in Vienna, Austria on 19-22 July 2022. The Information Visualisation Conference (iV) is an international conference that aims to provide a foundation for integrating the human-centered, technological and strategic aspects of information visualization to promote international exchange, cooperation, and development.

In the present information era, most aspects of our lives depend on and are driven by data, information, knowledge, user experience, and culture. Information Visualisation, Visual Analytics, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science are only a few research areas of the current state of art enabling to increase the comprehension of the information on which is based the infrastructure of our society. The International Conference on Information Visualisation is concentrated around these hot topics. As in the previous edition, also this year there will be the opportunity of starting international cooperations and European research projects, and of discussing with international relevance keynote speakers. The conference is articulated in symposia, with details and further information available on the Symposia webpage.

Your work may be submitted as

These submissions include, but are not limited to

  • Information Visualisation Theory & Practice
  • Narrative
  • Visualization and Storytelling
  • Glyphs: Shapes, Icons, Text and Imagery in Visualization
  • Information Visualization Evaluation
  • Visual Analytics
  • Social media analytics
  • GeoVisual Analytics and Spatial-Temporal Analytics
  • Knowledge Visualization and Visual Thinking
  • Advances in Interactive and Visual Data Clustering
  • Visualisation in Business Intelligence and Open Data
  • Knowledge Domain Visualisation
  • Open Source Intelligence and Web Mining & Web Visualization
  • Co-operative Design Visualisation
  • Human-Computer Interaction for Information Visualization
  • Graph and Network Visualisation
  • Digital Humanities Knowledge Visualization
  • BioMedical Visualization
  • Visualization, Art, & Design
  • Symposium of Digital Art and Gallery
  • Augmented Reality Visualization and Art
  • Computer Animation, Information Visualisation, and Digital Effects
  • Computer Games and their applications (CGa)
  • Multimedia and E-learning
  • Digital Entertainment

Interested parties in the area of Visual Computing are invited to submit paper their proposal until 15 March 2022 via the conference submission system.

Please note our summarization of the 26th International Conference Information Visualization (iV 2022) event.

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Digitization and digital education are playing an increasingly important role in career guidance, career preparation, and vocational education. Various open technologies and didactic approaches are available that can be used for digital teaching in vocational education. However, basic digital education and knowledge about the possibilities of digital teaching are often lacking. The VIS-Group is cooperating with the Groß-Gerau district and the Center for Applied Computer Science at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences to provide a single-source of learning materials and learning technologies in the “Dozenturio” learning system. The intermediate results of the project were introduced in December 15th 2021 by the VIS-Group. The event started with a welcome by the District Administrator Thomas Will followed by the main goals and conceptual structure by Nicole Möhlenkamp from the Department of Education and Schools – Youth Vocational Assistance, Qualification, and Employment. Among others, representatives of the adult education centers of the district and the city of Rüsselsheim am Main, the municipal job center of the district of Groß-Gerau, the state education authority and the IT center of the district were present. District Administrator Thomas Will and First District Deputy Walter Astheimer also took part in the panel discussion. The project website already includes various video training courses on communication systems, various selected OER learning platforms (OER: Open Educational Resources), and a variety of technologies to enable both the digital transformation and the didactical transformation of digital content. The platform is accessible to anyone who wants to learn about digital teaching and communication through www.dozenturio.de. The goal of the project is to develop qualification modules for digital teaching, learning, advising, and communicating. In addition, demand-oriented training offers for employees of the district as well as for regional educational institutions are planned. As part of the training and qualification budget of the state of Hesse. The district of Groß-Gerau has been provided with funds for the implementation of digital learning offerings for the period from September 1, 2020 to August 31, 2022, which will be used for the project described. With this funding program, the district of Groß-Gerau is taking advantage of the opportunities offered by digitization and opening up access opportunities for multipliers, teachers, and advisors.
Further information
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The Human-Computer Interaction and Visual Analytics group of the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences led the technical sessions on the first conference on establishing the Afghanistan Online University. Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi was assigned to the steering committee and the coordination team of the envisaged university.

The Afghanistan Online University aims to provide young persons of Afghan origin living outside Afghanistan – notably those living in refugee camps and other precarious settings – the opportunity to acquire general professional competencies and expertise in Afghan culture and society. A comprehensive system of online teaching, learning, and examination concurrently ensure the accessibility of the study provisions for young persons living in Afghanistan.

Students will be prepared to be professionally active in tune with their competencies all over the world and contribute to a desirable future of Afghanistan. A mix of professors and junior academics both from various countries of the world and of Afghan origin – among them those having lost the opportunity to serve universities in Afghanistan – can contribute to academic quality in all disciplines represented and the enhancement of knowledge on Afghan culture and society. Cooperation in teaching and research will be encouraged between scholars employed at this online university, those at a partner institution to be found for each discipline, and persons from many countries and institutions to be involved on a part-time basis.

Study programs on bachelor and master level, similar in length to the dominant „Bologna“ practices, as well as doctoral training will be provided – as customary at most open universities in the world – in the humanities, social sciences, and economic sciences, actually in 10 fields: Language and literature, education, psychology, social work, sociology, political science, journalism/communication science, economics, business studies, and additionally in IT/computer science. Master programs might specialize in certain topics (e.g. natural resources management) or interdisciplinary (e.g., gender studies). These fields are likely to be enriched by a creative dialogue between the theories, methods, and findings and the specifics of culture and society of Afghan culture and society. No study programs are envisaged in fields requiring substantial laboratory work or internships, of a clear universalistic knowledge base, and a sole national or regional thrust. Further education and continuing professional education programs might be added in the future.

Altogether, 60 professors and the same number of junior academic staff (FTE), supported by a substantial number of administrative staff, have to be employed for the ten disciplines to cover half of the teaching assignments and to be the backbone of research. A quarter of teaching each will be taken care of by scholars of the partner institutions and scholars from all over the world being involved part-time. Altogether, about 5,000 students can be accommodated, and a further increase can be realized with limited additional resources.

The online university will strive for high academic quality, a convincing link between academic quality and professional relevance, a guarantee of academic freedom, as well as support of the academic areas and of those persons suffering most under current adverse political conditions in Afghanistan, i.e., ethnic and religious minorities as well as women.

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Book appeared – Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Visualization

Professor Kawa Nazemi edited together with colleagues from the London South Bank University, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, and the Central Washington University enhanced contributions of selected papers of the International Conference on Information Visualisation particularly on the intersection of artificial intelligence and visualization. The book will appear in the series Studies in Computational Intelligence by Springer Nature.

The book “Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Visualization for Visual Knowledge Discovery” is devoted to the emerging field of integrated visual knowledge discovery that combines advances in artificial intelligence/machine learning and visualization/visual analytics. A long-standing challenge of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is explaining models to humans, especially for live-critical applications like health care. A model explanation is a fundamentally human activity, not only an algorithmic one. As current deep learning studies demonstrate, it makes the paradigm based on the visual methods critically important to address this challenge. In general, visual approaches are critical for discovering explainable high-dimensional patterns in all types in high-dimensional data offering “n-D glasses,” where preserving high-dimensional data properties and relations in visualizations is a major challenge. The current progress opens a fantastic opportunity in this domain.

This book is a collection of 25 extended works of over 70 scholars presented at AI and visual analytics-related symposia at the recent International Information Visualization Conferences with the goal of moving this integration to the next level.  The sections of this book cover integrated systems, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, optimization, and evaluation of visualizations.

The intended audience for this collection includes those developing and using emerging AI/machine learning and visualization methods. Scientists, practitioners, and students can find multiple examples of the current integration of AI/machine learning and visualization for visual knowledge discovery. The book provides a vision of future directions in this domain. New researchers will find here an inspiration to join the profession and to be involved for further development. Instructors in AI/ML and visualization classes can use it as a supplementary source in their undergraduate and graduate classes.

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Professor Kawa Nazemi was assigned as an advisory board member of the academic press of the European University of Technology (EUt+).

The EUt+ is an alliance of eight universities that make up the European University of Technology. The partners are Technical University of Sofia, Cyprus University of Technology, University of Technology Troyes, Hochschule Darmstadt, University of Applied Sciences, Technological University Dublin, Riga Technical University, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Technical University of Cartagena.

The EUT+ is part of the European initiative to build a European Education Area. The EUT+ Academic Press is an open access academic press. All material is free to read online. The academic press is committed to the principle that scholarship should be available to all without barriers or paywalls. It offers authors a global readership and thus contributes to the dissemination of knowledge. The academic press welcomes quality works of scholarship regardless of the subject area. The material is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license We are committed to Gold Open Access which is the free, immediate and permanent online access to a publication’s version of record. Currently, there are no fees for authors.

Please find more information here.

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Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kawa Nazemi is organizing together with Prof. Dr. Egils Ginters and Dr. Michael Bažant a special issue on “Visual Analytics, Simulation, and Decision-Making Technologies” in the MDPI Journal of Electronics.

The Journal of Electronics is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal on the science of electronics and its applications published semimonthly online by MDPI. It publishes reviews, research articles, short communications, and letters. The aim is to encourage scientists to publish their experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible. There is no restriction on the length of the papers. Full experimental and/or methodical details must be provided.

With the recent rise in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, new and unsolved societal economic challenges can be solved sophisticatedly. Disciplines such as visual analytics, simulation, data analytics, natural language processing, and image and video processing combined with the human in the interaction loop have led to new systems, methods, concepts, and architectural designs that help us to face societal challenges, e.g., climate, mobility, sustainability, smart city. Furthermore, these approaches lead to predicting likely future scenarios in the economy. These enhancements enable gathering the market relevance of upcoming technologies, analyzing the competitors and other forthcoming competitive technologies, and analyzing new markets for technologies. Thus, the aspect of sustainability plays an increasing role, even in market positioning or in the development and deployment of new technologies.

In this Special Issue, we are interested in systems, system architectures, computational techniques, methods and models, and literature reviews in the areas of analytical decision making, collaborative work, sustainability, economy, simulation, object monitoring, and behavior detection.

From a methodological point of view, the focus is on combining technological approaches from various disciplines to provide new ways and methods for analyzing data and models and enabling novel approaches for solving societal and economic challenges. On the practical side, we are looking for algorithms, software, prototypes, and demonstrators of decision-making support with the human-in-the-loop in various application fields. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

  • Visual analytics and information visualization
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning
  • Simulation and modeling for digital twins
  • Collaboration systems and collaborative work
  • Data analytics and natural language processing
  • Analytical systems for mobility, transportation, and traffic
  • Analytical systems for sustainability and environment
  • Analytical systems for corporate foresight
  • Analytical systems for smart manufacturing
  • Technologies for smart city, virtual, and augmented reality applications
  • Quantum and high-performance computing use
  • Digital wallet and blockchain synergy
  • Fault diagnosis in cyber-physical systems
  • Predictive maintenance in Industry 4.0
  • Object monitoring and behavior detection

If you are interested in the journal and in submitting an article, please note the information on the special issue website: Special Issue “Visual Analytics, Simulation, and Decision-Making Technologies”.

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We are proud to announce that our paper on Visual Analytics and Similarity Search – Interest-based Similarity Search in Scientific Data at the iV2021 conference was honored with “The Best Paper Award” for its innovative contribution in terms of originality of concepts and application in Visual Analytics and Data Science. The “Best Paper Awards” is given to contributions that will be selected by the committee among the papers presented in iV2021 and applied for the award. The study’s relevance to the symposium’s scope, its scientific contribution, writing/presentation style will be considered in the evaluation process as well.

The Information Visualisation Conference (iV) is an international conference that aims to provide a foundation for integrating the human-centered, technological and strategic aspects of information visualization to promote international exchange, cooperation, and development. The conference was held virtually at the University of Technology, Sydney.

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