This poster presents initial design steps exploring how sonification can be used to support visualization for comprehension of space and time in astronomical data. Radio signals travel at the speed of light. With a visualization of the universe, it is possible to travel faster than light and pass the radio waves leaving earth. We can then travel back in time. We propose to use sonification consisting of songs representing each year as a musical journey through space and time to create an engaging experience.

In this position paper we argue for the need of using standardized questionnaires for assessing usability in audio-visual representations. By using standardized measures of usability, comparability and validity of research studies in this field will be improved. However, it is not clear which questionnaire that is most suitable for assessing usability in audio-visual representations, neither when assessing the modalities individually or the combination. We present a variety of different questionnaires available, and argue for the need of combining different measures as well as developing new.

In various control systems, automation is implemented to increase efficiency and safety. With increased automation, it becomes increasingly relevant to view the automation as a team member, rather than as a tool. In best cases, human-automation teamwork keeps workload within acceptable limits, increase situation awareness, and keeps the operator in the control loop. However, human-automation teamwork will only flourish if the automation is developed with the human operator in mind. Therefore, investigations of the current experiences and expectations regarding automation and teamwork are important for the development of automation. Through a questionnaire among Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs), the present study aims to investigate how ATCOs perceive automation and safety in current and future air traffic control systems and the importance of different teamwork factors for human-human and human-automation collaboration. The results indicate that the ATCOs believe that safety will increase in the future along with increasing automation as long as the automation is working as expected. The ATCOs expressed a fear of deskilling and losing situation awareness with automation, a fear associated with a new ATCO role of monitoring the system and take over when the automation fails. The results suggest that design for human-automation teamwork aspects that ATCOs value, such as adaptability or mutual performance monitoring, could be a way forward.

Parallel coordinates are commonly used for non-temporal multivariate data, but there is little support for their usability for displaying temporal multivariate data. In this paper, we introduce a study evaluating the usability of 2D and 3D parallel coordinates for pattern identification in temporal multivariate data. The results indicate that 3D parallel coordinates have higher usability, as measured with higher accuracy and faster response time as well as subjective ratings, compared to 2D.

We present an interactive visual environment for linked analysis of brain imaging and clinical measurements. The environment is developed in an iterative participatory design process involving neuroscientists investigating the causes of brain-related complex diseases. The hypotheses formation process about correlations between active brain regions and physiological or psychological factors in studies with hundreds of subjects is a central part of the investigation. Observing the reasoning patterns during hypotheses formation, we concluded that while existing tools provide powerful analysis options, they lack effective interactive exploration, thus limiting the scientific scope and preventing extraction of knowledge from available data.Based on these observations, we designed methods that support neuroscientists by integrating their existing statistical analysis of multivariate subject data with interactive visual explorationto enable them to better understand differences between patient groups and the complex bidirectional interplay between clinical measurement and the brain. These exploration concepts enable neuroscientists, for the first time during their investigations, to interactively move between and reason about questions such as ‘which clinical measurements are correlated with a specific brain region?’ or ‘are there differences in brain activity between depressed young and old subjects?’. The environment uses parallel coordinates for effective overview and selection of subject groups, Welch's t-test to filter out brain regions with statistically significant differences, and multiple visualizations of Pearson correlations between brain regions and clinical parameters to facilitate correlation analysis. A qualitative user study was performed with three neuroscientists from different domains. The study shows that the developed environment supports simultaneous analysis of more parameters, provides rapid pathways to insights, and is an effective support tool for hypothesis formation.

The parallel coordinates technique is widely used for the analysis of multivariate data. During recent decades significant research efforts have been devoted to exploring the applicability of the technique and to expand upon it. resulting in a variety of extensions. Of these many research activities, a surprisingly small number concerns user-centred evaluations investigating actual use and usability issues for different tasks, data and domains. The result is a clear lack of convincing evidence to support and guide uptake by users as well as future research directions. To address these issues this paper contributes a thorough literature survey of what has been done in the area of user-centred evaluation of parallel coordinates. These evaluations are divided into four categories based on characterization of use, derived from the survey. Based on the data from the survey and the categorization combined with the authors experience of working with parallel coordinates, a set of guidelines for future research directions is proposed.

Medical imaging plays a central role in a vast range of healthcare practices. While the usefulness of 3D visualizations is well known, the adoption of such technology has previously been limited in many medical areas. This paper, awarded the Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine 2015, describes the development of a medical multi-touch visualization table that successfully has reached its aim to bring 3D visualization to a wider clinical audience. The descriptions summarize the targeted clinical scenarios, the key characteristics of the system, and the user feedback obtained.

In recent years, several different attempts have been made to extend the well-known technique of parallel coordinates using a three-dimensional display. This article presents an evaluation that investigates the performance of the three-dimensional parallel coordinates technique and compares it with standard, two-dimensional parallel coordinates for analysis of two-dimensional relationships. Three-dimensional parallel coordinates, based on parallel planes instead of parallel axes, have been used for many years within the information visualization community for a variety of applications. Despite its quite common use, no formal evaluation detailing its usefulness for different tasks has been conducted. The evaluation presented in this article is the first step towards determining the usefulness of this type of three-dimensional parallel coordinates. The study compared three-dimensional parallel coordinates, using two different axis configurations commonly seen in the literature, with standard two-dimensional parallel coordinates for identification of two-dimensional relationships between variables in multivariate data. This type of task and the relationships to be judged are known to be well supported by two-dimensional parallel coordinates and multi-relational three-dimensional parallel coordinates. The results show that for identification of two-dimensional relationships, two-dimensional parallel coordinates are superior to the three-dimensional extensions, in terms of both response time and accuracy. Subjective opinions were also in favour of two-dimensional parallel coordinates. This study adds to the much-needed body of work examining the usability of three-dimensional representations in information visualization and for what tasks and data a proposed method is or is not appropriate.

This study aims at explaining loss of separation events over the Swedish air space in 2011- 2012, which occurred despite an automated conflict detection tool working as designed. The study suggests that there may be a trade-off between spending visual scan time on own conflict detection versus visual scan time spent on examining potential conflicts presented by the conflict detection automation. The issue is hard to solve, and is unfortunately far from resolved. This area of research requires a substantial applied research effort, if the goal is to both increase safety and capacity of ATM through the use of automation.