Interactive Visualization

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Modern society demands that people manage, communicate and interact with digital information at an ever-increasing pace. While information is a crucial part of people's everyday lives, many people find today's technologies awkward, stressful to use, and overly intrusive in their lives. The problem is not with the information itself, but rather with its volume and the unwieldy ways currently provided for interacting with digital content. My long range goal is to design, develop and evaluate interactive information visualizations so that they support people's everyday work and social practices as they interact with information. My primary motivation is to promote information comprehension by creating appropriate tools that can help people negotiate the transformation of vast amounts of information into knowledge in people's everyday lives.**My long term objective is to design, develop and evaluate interactive visualizations of information that begin to address people's challenges as part of an information society and to enhance their cognitive and communicative abilities. Visualization can be created to help us see the invisible, to comprehend vast information spaces, to manipulate abstract concepts, to appreciate the beauty of information structure, and to support decision making and collaborative processes. Interactive visualizations are successful when they can help people interpret and understand information, steps which are integral in our processes of developing knowledge. My more immediate goals are to (1) improve our understanding how people naturally use sketches, diagrams and visualizations to support their cognitive processes; (2) to further explore how visualizations can support the many and varied ways that people access and discover information in the daily lives; and (3) to extend the information understanding that visualization is starting to offer in the laboratory and workplace to personal information needs. My research will work towards developing a basis for creating effective interactions that fit seamlessly in our everyday work and social practices, allowing us information manipulations that better support our decision processes and our ability to handle our ever-increasing information spaces.********