Visual Interaction for Network Information (VINI)

Next Century and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) propose to demonstrate a combination of theoretically-guided experimental-design, complex data sets, and embodied cognitive models to study and predict design and data factors that influence human performance in complex visualizations of large network data. We will leverage RPI"s Visual Interaction Architecture (VIA) which features an experimental infrastructure to conduct controlled experiments. The main components of this infrastructure are data collection device handling, an extensive logging capability, subject profiling, and data security. The data collection devices under VIA provide the capability to collect eye data, electroencephalogram (EEG) data, and user input. Parallel to the human experimental capability, VIA enables several forms of computational cognitive modeling including ACT-R process models, mathematical models of visual saliency and semantic relatedness, and stochastic activity network models. The data analysis capability of VIA includes eye data analysis, a cognitive and perceptual motor resource usage tool, a stochastic critical path generation tool, and a playback capability. For this project the objective is to design human experiments and cognitive models of the experimental tasks, then to compare models with data to derive design rules for visualization generation.