Question: A multi-task learning framework for domain adaptation in sequence tagging tasks.

This paper presents an innovative algorithm, CODA (Co-training for Domain Adaptation), designed to address the challenges of domain adaptation in machine learning models. The primary goal is to enable models trained in a source domain to effectively generalize to a new, target domain, particularly when the distributions of the two domains are significantly different, or when certain critical features of the target domain are absent in the source domain. The proposed algorithm gradually bridges the gap between source and target domains by incrementally incorporating target-specific features and instances where the current model demonstrates the highest confidence into the training set. Unlike traditional co-training methods which require a predefined feature split, CODA dynamically learns an optimal feature split and selects a subset of source and target features to be included in the predictor at each iteration. This adaptive approach ensures that the model progressively adjusts to the target domain while maintaining the benefits of the source domain training. CODA outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms on a 12-domain benchmark dataset, showcasing its superiority in a wide range of target supervision scenarios, achieving the best performance in 65 out of 84 comparisons.

Transfer learning is established as an effective technology in computer vision for leveraging rich labeled data in the source domain to build an accurate classifier for the target domain. However, most prior methods have not simultaneously reduced the difference in both the marginal distribution and conditional distribution between domains. In this paper, we put forward a novel transfer learning approach, referred to as Joint Distribution Adaptation (JDA). Specifically, JDA aims to jointly adapt both the marginal distribution and conditional distribution in a principled dimensionality reduction procedure, and construct new feature representation that is effective and robust for substantial distribution difference. Extensive experiments verify that JDA can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art methods on four types of cross-domain image classification problems.

This work addresses the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in automatic language identification (LID) focused on short test utterances. Motivated by their recent success in acoustic modelling for speech recognition, we adapt DNNs to the problem of identifying the language in a given utterance from the short-term acoustic features. We show how DNNs are particularly suitable to perform LID in real-time applications, due to their capacity to emit a language identification posterior at each new frame of the test utterance. We then analyse different aspects of the system, such as the amount of required training data, the number of hidden layers, the relevance of contextual information and the effect of the test utterance duration. Finally, we propose several methods to combine frame-by-frame posteriors. Experiments are conducted on two different datasets: the public NIST Language Recognition Evaluation 2009 (3 s task) and a much larger corpus (of 5 million utterances) known as Google 5M LID, obtained from different Google Services. Reported results show relative improvements of DNNs versus the i-vector system of 40% in LRE09 3 second task and 76% in Google 5M LID.

Multiplicative weight-updating algorithms such as Winnow have been studied extensively in the COLT literature, but only recently have people started to use them in applications. In this paper, we apply a Winnow-based algorithm to a task in natural language: contextsensitive spelling correction. This is the task of xing spelling errors that happen to result in valid words, such as substituting to for too, casual for causal, and so on. Previous approaches to this problem have been statistics-based; we compare Winnow to one of the more successful such approaches, which uses Bayesian classi ers. We nd that: (1) When the standard (heavily-pruned) set of features is used to describe problem instances, Winnow performs comparably to the Bayesian method; (2) When the full (unpruned) set of features is used, Winnow is able to exploit the new features and convincingly outperform Bayes; and (3) When a test set is encountered that is dissimilar to the training set, Winnow is better than Bayes at adapting to the unfamiliar test set, using a strategy we will present for combining learning on the training set with unsupervised learning on the (noisy) test set. In Machine Learning: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference, Lorenza Saitta, ed., Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 1996, pages 182{190. This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonpro t educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America. All rights reserved. Copyright c Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America, 1996 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Dept. of Appl. Math. & CS, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. 1. First printing, TR96-07, April 1996

This poster presents an integrated framework to enable using standard non-sequential machine learning tools for accurate multi-modal activity recognition. Our framework contains simple pre- and post-classification strategies such as class-imbalance correction on the learning data using structure preserving oversampling, leveraging the sequential nature of sensory data using smoothing of the predicted label sequence and classifier fusion, respectively, for improved performance. Through evaluation on recent publicly-available OPPORTUNITY activity datasets comprising of a large amount of multi-dimensional, continuous-valued sensory data, we show that our proposed strategies are effective in improving the performance over common techniques such as One Nearest Neighbor (1NN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). Our framework also shows better performance over sequential probabilistic models, such as Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and when these models are used as meta-learners.

This paper studies the novel learning scenarios of Distributed Online Multi-tasks (DOM), where the learning individuals with continuously arriving data are distributed separately and meanwhile they need to learn individual models collaboratively. It has three characteristics: distributed learning, online learning and multi-task learning. It is motivated by the emerging applications of wearable devices, which aim to provide intelligent monitoring services, such as health emergency alarming and movement recognition.
 To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has been done for this kind of problems. Thus, in this paper a collaborative learning scheme is proposed for this problem. Specifically, it performs local learning and global learning alternately. First, each client performs online learning using the increasing data locally. Then, DOM switches to global learning on the server side when some condition is triggered by clients. Here, an asynchronous online multi-task learning method is proposed for global learning. In this step, only this client's model, which triggers the global learning, is updated with the support of the difficult local data instances and the other clients' models. The experiments from 4 applications show that the proposed method of global learning can improve local learning significantly. DOM framework is effective, since it can share knowledge among distributed tasks and obtain better models than learning them separately. It is also communication efficient, which only requires the clients send a small portion of raw data to the server.

How should one apply deep learning to tasks such as morphological reinflection, which stochastically edit one string to get another? A recent approach to such sequence-to-sequence tasks is to compress the input string into a vector that is then used to generate the output string, using recurrent neural networks. In contrast, we propose to keep the traditional architecture, which uses a finite-state transducer to score all possible output strings, but to augment the scoring function with the help of recurrent networks. A stack of bidirectional LSTMs reads the input string from leftto-right and right-to-left, in order to summarize the input context in which a transducer arc is applied. We combine these learned features with the transducer to define a probability distribution over aligned output strings, in the form of a weighted finite-state automaton. This reduces hand-engineering of features, allows learned features to examine unbounded context in the input string, and still permits exact inference through dynamic programming. We illustrate our method on the tasks of morphological reinflection and lemmatization.

We describe a unified active transfer learning framework called Hierarchical Active Transfer Learning (HATL). HATL exploits cluster structure shared between different data domains to perform transfer learning by imputing labels for unlabeled target data and to generate effective label queries during active learning. The resulting framework is flexible enough to perform not only adaptive transfer learning and accelerated active learning but also unsupervised and semi-supervised transfer learning. We derive an intuitive and useful upper bound on HATL’s error when used to infer labels for unlabeled target points. We also present results on synthetic data that confirm both intuition and our analysis. Finally, we demonstrate HATL’s empirical effectiveness on a benchmark data set for sentiment classification.

Without discourse connectives, classifying implicit discourse relations is a challenging task and a bottleneck for building a practical discourse parser. Previous research usually makes use of one kind of discourse framework such as PDTB or RST to improve the classification performance on discourse relations. Actually, under different discourse annotation frameworks, there exist multiple corpora which have internal connections. To exploit the combination of different discourse corpora, we design related discourse classification tasks specific to a corpus, and propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network embedded multi-task learning system to synthesize these tasks by learning both unique and shared representations for each task. The experimental results on the PDTB implicit discourse relation classification task demonstrate that our model achieves significant gains over baseline systems.

In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised kernel matching method to address domain adaptation problems where the source distribution substantially differs from the target distribution. Specifically, we learn a prediction function on the labeled source data while mapping the target data points to similar source data points by matching the target kernel matrix to a submatrix of the source kernel matrix based on a Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion. We formulate this simultaneous learning and mapping process as a non-convex integer optimization problem and present a local minimization procedure for its relaxed continuous form. Our empirical results show the proposed kernel matching method significantly outperforms alternative methods on the task of cross domain sentiment classification.

Inductive transfer learning has greatly impacted computer vision, but existing approaches in NLP still require task-specific modifications and training from scratch. We propose Universal Language Model Fine-tuning (ULMFiT), an effective transfer learning method that can be applied to any task in NLP, and introduce techniques that are key for fine-tuning a language model. Our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on six text classification tasks, reducing the error by 1824% on the majority of datasets. Furthermore, with only 100 labeled examples, it matches the performance of training from scratch on 100× more data. We opensource our pretrained models and code1.


Question: A multi-task learning framework for domain adaptation in sequence tagging tasks.

This article introduces a straightforward unsupervised learning technique for categorizing reviews into positive (thumbs up) or negative (thumbs down) sentiments. The classification of a review is determined by averaging the semantic orientation of phrases that include adjectives or adverbs within the text. A phrase exhibits a positive semantic orientation when it is associated with favorable terms (such as “subtle nuances”), and a negative orientation when linked with unfavorable expressions (such as “very cavalier”). Here, the semantic orientation of a phrase is quantified as the mutual information between the phrase and the term “excellent” subtracted by the mutual information between the phrase and the term “poor”. A review is deemed positive if the mean semantic orientation of its constituent phrases is positive. When tested on a dataset of 410 reviews from Epinions, covering four distinct categories—automobiles, banks, movies, and travel destinations—the algorithm yields an average accuracy of 74%. The accuracy varies from 84% for automobile reviews to 66% for movie reviews, illustrating its effectiveness across different domains.

**Question**: Multi-task Domain Adaptation for Sequence Tagging

**Documents**: Leveraging Multiple Sources for Domain Adaptation in Sequence Tagging
This paper explores the use of multi-source domain adaptation for sequence tagging tasks. We propose a novel approach that combines data from multiple domains to improve the performance of a sequence tagging model on a target domain with limited labeled data. Our method, Multi-Source Domain Adaptation for Sequence Tagging (MS-DAST), utilizes a shared representation learning framework to capture domain-invariant features while also learning domain-specific features. We evaluate our approach on several sequence tagging tasks, including named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging, across multiple domains such as news, social media, and clinical text. The experimental results demonstrate that MS-DAST significantly outperforms single-source domain adaptation methods and models trained on the target domain alone, achieving an average improvement of 3.5% in F1-score.

**Similar Documents**: This study investigates the efficacy of multi-source domain adaptation in enhancing sequence tagging tasks. We introduce a new method, termed Multi-Source Domain Adaptation for Sequence Tagging (MS-DAST), designed to augment the capabilities of a sequence tagging model in a target domain with scarce labeled data by leveraging information from multiple domains. MS-DAST employs a shared representation learning framework to identify features that are invariant across domains, complemented by the acquisition of domain-specific features. We assess the performance of our method on a variety of sequence

• CRF-based methods: • StanfordNER [4]: CRF + standard features • GermaNER [5]: CRF + distributional semantics, gazetteers, ... • Recurrent Neural Network: • BiLSTM + CRF [6] using characterand word embeddings using FastText • Wikipedia (contemporary encyclopedia) • Europeana (historic newspaper from 1703 to 1899) Conclusion & Future Contemporary corpora: minor improvements GermEval: 82.93 à 82.93 CoNLL: 82.99 à 84.73 Historic corpora: major improvements LFT: 69.62 à 73.44 ONB: 70.46 à 78.56 Same setup as Exp. 2 but with transfer learning and considering only the BiLSTM-based method

Supervised learning techniques for text classi cation often require a large number of labeled examples to learn accurately. One way to reduce the amount of labeled data required is to develop algorithms that can learn e ectively from a small number of labeled examples augmented with a large number of unlabeled examples. Current text learning techniques for combining labeled and unlabeled, such as EM and Co-Training, are mostly applicable for classi cation tasks with a small number of classes and do not scale up well for large multiclass problems. In this paper, we develop a framework to incorporate unlabeled data in the Error-Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) setup by rst decomposing multiclass problems into multiple binary problems and then using Co-Training to learn the individual binary classi cation problems. We show that our method is especially useful for text classi cation tasks involving a large number of categories and outperforms other semi-supervised learning techniques such as EM and Co-Training. In addition to being highly accurate, this method utilizes the hamming distance from ECOC to provide high-precision results. We also present results with algorithms other than co-training in this framework and show that co-training is uniquely suited to work well within ECOC.

Deep learning yields great results across many fields, from speech recognition, image classification, to translation. But for each problem, getting a deep model to work well involves research into the architecture and a long period of tuning. We present a single model that yields good results on a number of problems spanning multiple domains. In particular, this single model is trained concurrently on ImageNet, multiple translation tasks, image captioning (COCO dataset), a speech recognition corpus, and an English parsing task. Our model architecture incorporates building blocks from multiple domains. It contains convolutional layers, an attention mechanism, and sparsely-gated layers. Each of these computational blocks is crucial for a subset of the tasks we train on. Interestingly, even if a block is not crucial for a task, we observe that adding it never hurts performance and in most cases improves it on all tasks. We also show that tasks with less data benefit largely from joint training with other tasks, while performance on large tasks degrades only slightly if at all.

Multiplicative weight-updating algorithms such as Winnow have been studied extensively in the COLT literature, but only recently have people started to use them in applications. In this paper, we apply a Winnow-based algorithm to a task in natural language: contextsensitive spelling correction. This is the task of xing spelling errors that happen to result in valid words, such as substituting to for too, casual for causal, and so on. Previous approaches to this problem have been statistics-based; we compare Winnow to one of the more successful such approaches, which uses Bayesian classi ers. We nd that: (1) When the standard (heavily-pruned) set of features is used to describe problem instances, Winnow performs comparably to the Bayesian method; (2) When the full (unpruned) set of features is used, Winnow is able to exploit the new features and convincingly outperform Bayes; and (3) When a test set is encountered that is dissimilar to the training set, Winnow is better than Bayes at adapting to the unfamiliar test set, using a strategy we will present for combining learning on the training set with unsupervised learning on the (noisy) test set. In Machine Learning: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference, Lorenza Saitta, ed., Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 1996, pages 182{190. This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonpro t educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America. All rights reserved. Copyright c Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America, 1996 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Dept. of Appl. Math. & CS, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. 1. First printing, TR96-07, April 1996

Sequence to sequence models are successful tools for supervised sequence learning tasks, such as machine translation. Despite their success, these models still require much labeled data and it is unclear how to improve them using unlabeled data, which is much less expensive to obtain. In this paper, we present simple changes that lead to a significant improvement in the accuracy of seq2seq models when the labeled set is small. Our method intializes the encoder and decoder of the seq2seq model with the trained weights of two language models, and then all weights are jointly fine-tuned with labeled data. An additional language modeling loss can be used to regularize the model during fine-tuning. We apply this method to low-resource tasks in machine translation and abstractive summarization and find that it significantly improves the subsequent supervised models. Our main finding is that the pretraining accelerates training and improves generalization of seq2seq models, achieving state-of-the-art results on the WMT English→German task. Our model obtains an improvement of 1.3 BLEU from the previous best models on both WMT’14 and WMT’15 English→German. Our ablation study shows that pretraining helps seq2seq models in different ways depending on the nature of the task: translation benefits from the improved generalization whereas summarization benefits from the improved optimization.

Word Sense Disambiguation models exist in many flavors. Even though supervised ones tend to perform best in terms of accuracy, they often lose ground to more flexible knowledge-based solutions, which do not require training by a word expert for every disambiguation target. To bridge this gap we adopt a different perspective and rely on sequence learning to frame the disambiguation problem: we propose and study in depth a series of end-to-end neural architectures directly tailored to the task, from bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory to encoder-decoder models. Our extensive evaluation over standard benchmarks and in multiple languages shows that sequence learning enables more versatile all-words models that consistently lead to state-of-the-art results, even against word experts with engineered features.

We explore efficient domain adaptation for the task of statistical machine translation based on extracting sentences from a large generaldomain parallel corpus that are most relevant to the target domain. These sentences may be selected with simple cross-entropy based methods, of which we present three. As these sentences are not themselves identical to the in-domain data, we call them pseudo in-domain subcorpora. These subcorpora – 1% the size of the original – can then used to train small domain-adapted Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems which outperform systems trained on the entire corpus. Performance is further improved when we use these domain-adapted models in combination with a true in-domain model. The results show that more training data is not always better, and that best results are attained via proper domain-relevant data selection, as well as combining inand general-domain systems during decoding.

Top-performing deep architectures are trained on massive amounts of labeled data. In the absence of labeled data for a certain task, domain adaptation often provides an attractive option given that labeled data of similar nature but from a different domain (e.g. synthetic images) are available. Here, we propose a new approach to domain adaptation in deep architectures that can be trained on large amount of labeled data from the source domain and large amount of unlabeled data from the target domain (no labeled targetdomain data is necessary). As the training progresses, the approach promotes the emergence of “deep” features that are (i) discriminative for the main learning task on the source domain and (ii) invariant with respect to the shift between the domains. We show that this adaptation behaviour can be achieved in almost any feed-forward model by augmenting it with few standard layers and a simple new gradient reversal layer. The resulting augmented architecture can be trained using standard backpropagation. Overall, the approach can be implemented with little effort using any of the deep-learning packages. The method performs very well in a series of image classification experiments, achieving adaptation effect in the presence of big domain shifts and outperforming previous state-ofthe-art on Office datasets.

Multitask Learning has been proven to be more effective than the traditional single task learning on many real-world problems by simultaneously transferring knowledge among different tasks which may suffer from limited labeled data. However, in order to build a reliable multitask learning model, nontrivial effort to construct the relatedness between different tasks is critical. When the number of tasks is not large, the learning outcome may suffer if there exists outlier tasks that inappropriately bias majority. Rather than identifying or discarding such outlier tasks, we present a weighted regularized multitask learning framework based on regularized multitask learning, which uses statistical metrics, such as Kullback-Leibler divergence, to assign weights prior to regularization process that robustly reduces the impact of outlier tasks and results in better learned models for all tasks. We then show that this formulation can be solved using dual form like optimizing a standard support vector machine with varied kernels. We perform experiments using both synthetic dataset and real-world dataset from petroleum industry which shows that our methodology outperforms existing methods.

The success and impact of activity recognition algorithms largely depends on the availability of the labeled training samples and adaptability of activity recognition models across various domains. In a new environment, the pre-trained activity recognition models face challenges in presence of sensing bias- ness, device heterogeneities, and inherent variabilities in human behaviors and activities. Activity Recognition (AR) system built in one environment does not scale well in another environment, if it has to learn new activities and the annotated activity samples are scarce. Indeed building a new activity recognition model and training the model with large annotated samples often help overcome this challenging problem. However, collecting annotated samples is cost-sensitive and learning activity model at wild is computationally expensive. In this work, we propose an activity recognition framework, UnTran that utilizes source domains' pre-trained autoencoder enabled activity model that transfers two layers of this network to generate a common feature space for both source and target domain activities. We postulate a hybrid AR framework that helps fuse the decisions from a trained model in source domain and two activity models (raw and deep-feature based activity model) in target domain reducing the demand of annotated activity samples to help recognize unseen activities. We evaluated our framework with three real-world data traces consisting of 41 users and 26 activities in total. Our proposed UnTran AR framework achieves ≈ 75% F1 score in recognizing unseen new activities using only 10% labeled activity data in the target domain. UnTran attains ≈ 98% F1 score while recognizing seen activities in presence of only 2-3% of labeled activity samples.


Question: A systematic review of innovative information visualization techniques for electronic health record data.

This paper outlines an agenda for visual analytics, a field that integrates advancements from scientific and information visualization, statistical analysis, data representation, and cognitive sciences. Despite some ongoing research, the rate at which new technologies and expertise are emerging is insufficient to address the pressing demand. The National Visualization and Analytics Center aims to advance the field, enabling analysts to discern patterns and uncover surprises in vast, dynamic datasets from diverse and often conflicting sources. Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary endeavor focusing on analytical reasoning, visual representations, data transformations, and the dissemination of analytical findings. The research and development agenda for visual analytics targets technical enhancements in these areas and suggests strategies to expedite the adoption of innovative technologies. This article offers a brief overview of the agenda, inviting further reading, discussion, and active contribution to the evolution of visual analytics. In the context of electronic health records, visual analytics can play a crucial role in making sense of complex patient data, aiding in diagnosis, treatment planning, and population health management. By applying visual analytics to EHR data, healthcare professionals can identify trends, patterns, and outliers that might otherwise go unnoticed, leading to improved patient outcomes and more efficient healthcare delivery. The systematic review of innovative information visualization techniques for EHR data seeks to compile and evaluate the most effective methods for presenting this critical information, ensuring that healthcare providers have the tools they need to make informed decisions.

The present-day health data ecosystem comprises a wide array of complex heterogeneous data sources. A wide range of clinical, health care, social and other clinically relevant information are stored in these data sources. These data exist either as structured data or as free-text. These data are generally individual person-based records, but social care data are generally case based and less formal data sources may be shared by groups. The structured data may be organised in a proprietary way or be coded using one-of-many coding, classification or terminologies that have often evolved in isolation and designed to meet the needs of the context that they have been developed. This has resulted in a wide range of semantic interoperability issues that make the integration of data held on these different systems changing. We present semantic interoperability challenges and describe a classification of these. We propose a four-step process and a toolkit for those wishing to work more ontologically, progressing from the identification and specification of concepts to validating a final ontology. The four steps are: (1) the identification and specification of data sources; (2) the conceptualisation of semantic meaning; (3) defining to what extent routine data can be used as a measure of the process or outcome of care required in a particular study or audit and (4) the formalisation and validation of the final ontology. The toolkit is an extension of a previous schema created to formalise the development of ontologies related to chronic disease management. The extensions are focused on facilitating rapid building of ontologies for time-critical research studies.

medical fields has led to the automated processing ofpictorial data. Here, a device called the cytocomputer searches for genetic mutations. A computer revolution has occurred not only in technical fields but also in medicine, where vast amounts of information must be processed quickly and accurately. Nowhere is the need for image processing techniques more apparent than in clinical diagnosis or mass screening applications where data take the form of digital images. New high-resolution scanning techniques such as computed tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance, po-sitron emission tomography, and digital radiography produce images containing immense amounts of relevant information for medical analysis. But as these scanning techniques become more vital to clinical diagnosis, the work for specialists who must visually examine the resultant images increases. In many cases, quantitative data in the form of measurements and counts are needed to supplement nonimage patient data, and the manual extraction of these data is a time-consuming and costly step in an otherwise automated process. Furthermore, subtle variants of shade and shape can be the earliest clues to a diagnosis, placing the additional burden of complete thoroughness on the examining specialist. For the last five years, the University of Michigan and the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan have conducted a unique series of studies that involve the processing of biomedical imagery on a highly parallel computer specifically designed for image processing. System designers have incorporated the requirements of extracting a verifiable answer from an image in a reasonable time into an integrated approach to hardware and software design. The system includes a parallel pipelined image processor, called a cytocomputer, and a high-level language specifically created for image processing, C-3PL, the cytocomputer parallel picture processing language. These studies have involved a great many people from both the medical and engineering communities and have highlighted the interdisciplinary aspects of biomedical image processing. The methods have been tested in anatomy, developmental biology, nuclear medicine, car-diology, and transplant rejection. The general consensus is that quantification by automated image analysis not only increases diagnostic accuracy but also provides significant data not obtainable from qualitative analysis alone. One study in particular, on which descriptions in this article are based, involves a joint effort by the University of Michigan's human genetics and electrical and computer engineering departments and is supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute. Basically, automated image analysis is being applied via sophisticated biochemical and computer techniques to derive …

E-health is a health care system which is supported by electronic process and communication. The information that is kept in the system must be accurate. In case of false information, it may cause harm to human life. So this system needs more security to protect the credential information. E-Health system is the most security sensitive process handled electronically. The highest achievable security is never too much for an E-Health system. So when system is being built, tasks such as Security Requirements Elicitation, Specification and Validation are essential to assure the Quality of the resulting secure E-Health system. By considering the Security requirements as functional requirements in the Requirement phase, the completeness of Security Requirements for E-Health system can be developed. In this paper we propose Model Oriented Security Requirements Engineering (MOSRE) Framework in the early phases of E-Health system development, to identify assets, threats and vulnerabilities. This helps in standardizing the Security Requirements for secure E-Health system without any security issues.

Abstract. In the article, an additional visualization of self-organizing maps (SOM) has been investigated. The main objective of self-organizing maps is data clustering and their graphical presentation. Opportunities of SOM visualization in four systems (NeNet, SOM-Toolbox, Databionic ESOM and Viscovery SOMine) have been investigated. Each system has its additional tools for visualizing SOM. A comparative analysis has been made for two data sets: Fisher’s iris data set and the economic indices of the European Union countries. A new SOM system is also introduced and researched. The system has a specific visualization tool. It is missing in other SOM systems. It helps to see the proportion of neurons, corresponding to the data items, belonging to the different classes, and fallen in the same SOM cell.

Introduction Given the fact that the driving task will remarkably change by the increase of assistance and information systems in the future innovative display technologies play a central role for the ergonomic realization of the driver vehicle interaction. Increasing assistance and even automation of the driving task do not lead to a decrease or disappearance of visual information but instead request new and in some cases revolutionary concepts to close the loop between driver, vehicle and traffic environment. Augmenting information in contact analog head-up-displays for navigation and driver assistance is a very promising approach. Replacement of mirrors via camera monitor systems is a further example. Free programmable cluster instruments in combination with HUD promise to resolve the problem of information density produced by an increasing amount of ADAS and IVIS functionality.

Collecting and processing provenance, i.e., information describing the production process of some end product, is important in various applications, e.g., to assess quality, to ensure reproducibility, or to reinforce trust in the end product. In the past, different types of provenance meta-data have been proposed, each with a different scope. The first part of the proposed tutorial provides an overview and comparison of these different types of provenance. To put provenance to good use, it is essential to be able to interact with and present provenance data in a user-friendly way. Often, users interested in provenance are not necessarily experts in databases or query languages, as they are typically domain experts of the product and production process for which provenance is collected (biologists, journalists, etc.). Furthermore, in some scenarios, it is difficult to use solely queries for analyzing and exploring provenance data. The second part of this tutorial therefore focuses on enabling users to leverage provenance through adapted visualizations. To this end, we will present some fundamental concepts of visualization before we discuss possible visualizations for provenance.

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2017 caption tasks on the analysis of images from the biomedical literature. Two subtasks were proposed to the participants: a concept detection task and caption prediction task, both using only images as input. The two subtasks tackle the problem of providing image interpretation by extracting concepts and predicting a caption based on the visual information of an image alone. A dataset of 184,000 figure-caption pairs from the biomedical open access literature (PubMed Central) are provided as a testbed with the majority of them as trainign data and then 10,000 as validation and 10,000 as test data. Across two tasks, 11 participating groups submitted 71 runs. While the domain remains challenging and the data highly heterogeneous, we can note some surprisingly good results of the difficult task with a quality that could be beneficial for health applications by better exploiting the visual content of biomedical figures.

This study applies the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to the phenomenon of physician adoption of electronic medical records (EMR) technology. UTAUT integrates eight theories of individual acceptance into one comprehensive model designed to assist in understanding what factors either enable or hinder technology adoption and use. As such, it provides a useful lens through which to view what is currently taking place in the healthcare industry regarding EMR adoption. This is mutually beneficial to both the healthcare and MIS communities, as UTAUT offers valuable practical insight to the healthcare industry in explaining why EMR technology has not been more widely adopted as well as what prescriptions may facilitate future adoption, while offering the MIS community the opportunity to strengthen existing theory through an illustration of its application.

Clinical pathways define the essential component of the complex care process, with the objective to optimize patient outcomes and resource allocation. Clinical pathway analysis has gained increased attention in order to augment the patient treatment process. In this demonstration paper, we propose Pathway-Finder, an interactive recommender system to visually explore and discover clinical pathways. The interactive web service efficiently collects and displays patient information in a meaningful way to support an effective personalized treatment plan. Pathway-Finder implements a Bayesian Network to discover causal relationships among different factors. To support real-time recommendation and visualization, a key-value structure has been implemented to traverse the Bayesian Network faster. Additionally, Pathway-Finder is a cloud based web service hosted on Microsoft Azure which enables the health providers to access the system without the need to deploy analytics infrastructure. We demonstrate Pathway-Finder to interactively recommend personalized interventions to minimize 30-day readmission risk for Heart Failure (HF).

On the issue of how to explore the complex relationships of entities in a story, Storyline visualization has proven to be a useful approach. The traditional Storyline visualization technology only applies to a linear continuous story and has the limitation of reflecting the development of the plots in a story. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical plot visualization method called StoryCake to improve this problem. First, according to the story elements, inter-sessions are divided into groups, whereby the layout of the entities will be optimized in individual groups. Then, the hierarchical relationships of entities in polar coordinates can be confirmed. Finally, we use several skills, e.g., interaction, labels and a fan-shaped visualization view, to enable people better understand how story evolves and track the hierarchical relationship more conveniently. Experimental results show that the proposed hierarchical plot visualization method in polar coordinates can reveal discontinuous events and nonlinear stories. The results also show that our algorithm presents the narrative structure and development of the story.


Question: A systematic review of innovative information visualization techniques for electronic health record data.

This paper delves into the intricacies of variable and feature selection, a critical area of research in fields where datasets encompassing tens to hundreds of thousands of variables are commonplace. Such fields encompass internet document text processing, gene expression array analysis, and combinatorial chemistry. The primary goals of variable selection encompass three key aspects: enhancing the predictive accuracy of models, streamlining prediction processes for greater speed and cost-efficiency, and deepening our comprehension of the data-generating processes. The articles compiled in this special issue encompass a comprehensive spectrum of these issues, including refining the objective function for clearer definition, devising novel features, ranking features for prioritization, exploring multivariate feature selection strategies, devising efficient search algorithms, and establishing robust methods for assessing feature validity. This collective body of work underscores the multifaceted nature of variable and feature selection and its pivotal role in advancing data analysis techniques across diverse domains.

Innovative information visualization of electronic health record data: a systematic review
Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have become ubiquitous in healthcare, offering a wealth of data that can be harnessed to improve patient care and clinical decision-making. However, the complexity and volume of EHR data pose significant challenges for effective information visualization. This systematic review aims to identify and evaluate innovative visualization techniques that have been developed specifically for EHR data. By analyzing studies published over the past decade, we assess the effectiveness of these techniques in facilitating data interpretation, enhancing clinical workflow, and supporting decision-making processes. Our findings highlight the importance of user-centered design principles, the integration of contextual information, and the need for interactive and customizable visualizations. We also discuss the limitations and future directions for research in this field, emphasizing the potential for machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance visualization capabilities and personalize EHR interfaces for individual clinicians and patient populations.

The healthcare industry is a vast field with a plethora of data about patients,added to the huge medical records every passing day. In terms of science, this industry is ’information rich’ yet ’knowledge poor’. However, data mining with its various analytical tools and techniques plays a major role in reducing the use of cumbersome tests used on patients to detect a disease. The aim of this paper is to employ and analyze different data mining techniques for the prediction of heart disease in a patient through extraction of interesting patterns from the dataset using vital parameters. This paper strives to bring out the methodology and implementation of these techniques-Artificial Neural Networks, Decision Tree and Naive Bayes and stress upon the results and conclusion induced on the basis of accuracy and time complexity. By far, the observations reveal that Artificial Neural Networks outperformed Naive Bayes and Decision Tree.

Although advances in information technology in the past decade have come in quantum leaps in nearly every aspect of our lives, they seem to be coming at a slower pace in the field of medicine. However, the implementation of electronic health records (EHR) in hospitals is increasing rapidly, accelerated by the meaningful use initiatives associated with the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services EHR Incentive Programs. The transition to electronic medical records and availability of patient data has been associated with increases in the volume and complexity of patient information, as well as an increase in medical alerts, with resulting "alert fatigue" and increased expectations for rapid and accurate diagnosis and treatment. Unfortunately, these increased demands on health care providers create greater risk for diagnostic and therapeutic errors. In the near future, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning will likely assist physicians with differential diagnosis of disease, treatment options suggestions, and recommendations, and, in the case of medical imaging, with cues in image interpretation. Mining and advanced analysis of "big data" in health care provide the potential not only to perform "in silico" research but also to provide "real time" diagnostic and (potentially) therapeutic recommendations based on empirical data. "On demand" access to high-performance computing and large health care databases will support and sustain our ability to achieve personalized medicine. The IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, which pitted the best all-time human players against the Watson computer, captured the imagination of millions of people across the world and demonstrated the potential to apply AI approaches to a wide variety of subject matter, including medicine. The combination of AI, big data, and massively parallel computing offers the potential to create a revolutionary way of practicing evidence-based, personalized medicine.

Tree visualization is one of the best-studied areas of information visualization; researchers have developed more than 200 visualization and layout techniques for trees. The treevis.net project aims to provide a hand-curated bibliographical reference to this ever-growing wealth of techniques. It offers a visual overview that users can filter to a desired subset along the design criteria of dimensionality, edge representation, and node alignment. Details, including links to the original publications, can be brought up on demand. Treevis.net has become a community effort, with researchers sending in preprints of their tree visualization techniques to be published or pointing out additional information.

medical fields has led to the automated processing ofpictorial data. Here, a device called the cytocomputer searches for genetic mutations. A computer revolution has occurred not only in technical fields but also in medicine, where vast amounts of information must be processed quickly and accurately. Nowhere is the need for image processing techniques more apparent than in clinical diagnosis or mass screening applications where data take the form of digital images. New high-resolution scanning techniques such as computed tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance, po-sitron emission tomography, and digital radiography produce images containing immense amounts of relevant information for medical analysis. But as these scanning techniques become more vital to clinical diagnosis, the work for specialists who must visually examine the resultant images increases. In many cases, quantitative data in the form of measurements and counts are needed to supplement nonimage patient data, and the manual extraction of these data is a time-consuming and costly step in an otherwise automated process. Furthermore, subtle variants of shade and shape can be the earliest clues to a diagnosis, placing the additional burden of complete thoroughness on the examining specialist. For the last five years, the University of Michigan and the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan have conducted a unique series of studies that involve the processing of biomedical imagery on a highly parallel computer specifically designed for image processing. System designers have incorporated the requirements of extracting a verifiable answer from an image in a reasonable time into an integrated approach to hardware and software design. The system includes a parallel pipelined image processor, called a cytocomputer, and a high-level language specifically created for image processing, C-3PL, the cytocomputer parallel picture processing language. These studies have involved a great many people from both the medical and engineering communities and have highlighted the interdisciplinary aspects of biomedical image processing. The methods have been tested in anatomy, developmental biology, nuclear medicine, car-diology, and transplant rejection. The general consensus is that quantification by automated image analysis not only increases diagnostic accuracy but also provides significant data not obtainable from qualitative analysis alone. One study in particular, on which descriptions in this article are based, involves a joint effort by the University of Michigan's human genetics and electrical and computer engineering departments and is supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute. Basically, automated image analysis is being applied via sophisticated biochemical and computer techniques to derive …

OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this paper is to give an overview about the state of the art in research on home telehealth in an international perspective.

METHOD
The study is based on a review of the scientific literature published between 1990 and 2003 and retrieved via Medline in January/February 2004. All together, the abstracts of 578 publications have been analyzed.

RESULTS
The majority of publications (44%) comes from the United States, followed by UK and Japan. Most publications deal with vital sign parameter (VSP) measurement and audio/video consultations ("virtual visits"). Publications about IT tools for improved information access and communication as well as decision support for staff, patients and relatives are relatively sparse. Clinical application domains are mainly chronic diseases, the elderly population and paediatrics.

CONCLUSIONS
Internationally, we observe a trend towards tools and services not only for professionals but also for patients and citizens. However, their impact on the patient-provider relationship and their design for special user groups, such as elderly and/or disabled needs to be further explored. In general, evaluation studies are rare and further research is critical to determine the impacts and benefits, and limitations, of potential solutions and to overcome a number of hinders and restrictions, such as - the lack of standards to combine incompatible information systems; - the lack of an evaluation framework considering legal, ethical, organisational, clinical, usability and technical aspects; - the lack of proper guidelines for practical implementation of home telehealth solutions.

The objective of security data visualizations is to help cyber analysts to perceive trends and patterns, and gain insights into security data. Sound and systematic evaluations of security data visualizations are rarely performed, in part due to the lack of proper quantitative and qualitative measures. In this paper, we present a novel evaluation approach for security visualization based on Christopher Alexander's fifteen properties of living structures. Alexander's fifteen properties are derived from various visual patterns that appear in nature. Each property represents the guidelines for good design. We believe that using these fundamental properties have the potential for building a more robust evaluation. Each property offers essential qualities that enable better analytical reasoning. We demonstrate how to use Alexander's properties to evaluate security related visualizations. We derive a set of visualization-specific properties for evaluation, developed based on Alexander's original properties.

E-health is a health care system which is supported by electronic process and communication. The information that is kept in the system must be accurate. In case of false information, it may cause harm to human life. So this system needs more security to protect the credential information. E-Health system is the most security sensitive process handled electronically. The highest achievable security is never too much for an E-Health system. So when system is being built, tasks such as Security Requirements Elicitation, Specification and Validation are essential to assure the Quality of the resulting secure E-Health system. By considering the Security requirements as functional requirements in the Requirement phase, the completeness of Security Requirements for E-Health system can be developed. In this paper we propose Model Oriented Security Requirements Engineering (MOSRE) Framework in the early phases of E-Health system development, to identify assets, threats and vulnerabilities. This helps in standardizing the Security Requirements for secure E-Health system without any security issues.

To verify cluster separation in high-dimensional data, analysts often reduce the data with a dimension reduction (DR) technique, and then visualize it with 2D Scatterplots, interactive 3D Scatterplots, or Scatterplot Matrices (SPLOMs). With the goal of providing guidance between these visual encoding choices, we conducted an empirical data study in which two human coders manually inspected a broad set of 816 scatterplots derived from 75 datasets, 4 DR techniques, and the 3 previously mentioned scatterplot techniques. Each coder scored all color-coded classes in each scatterplot in terms of their separability from other classes. We analyze the resulting quantitative data with a heatmap approach, and qualitatively discuss interesting scatterplot examples. Our findings reveal that 2D scatterplots are often 'good enough', that is, neither SPLOM nor interactive 3D adds notably more cluster separability with the chosen DR technique. If 2D is not good enough, the most promising approach is to use an alternative DR technique in 2D. Beyond that, SPLOM occasionally adds additional value, and interactive 3D rarely helps but often hurts in terms of poorer class separation and usability. We summarize these results as a workflow model and implications for design. Our results offer guidance to analysts during the DR exploration process.

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2017 caption tasks on the analysis of images from the biomedical literature. Two subtasks were proposed to the participants: a concept detection task and caption prediction task, both using only images as input. The two subtasks tackle the problem of providing image interpretation by extracting concepts and predicting a caption based on the visual information of an image alone. A dataset of 184,000 figure-caption pairs from the biomedical open access literature (PubMed Central) are provided as a testbed with the majority of them as trainign data and then 10,000 as validation and 10,000 as test data. Across two tasks, 11 participating groups submitted 71 runs. While the domain remains challenging and the data highly heterogeneous, we can note some surprisingly good results of the difficult task with a quality that could be beneficial for health applications by better exploiting the visual content of biomedical figures.

Health monitoring systems have rapidly evolved during the past two decades and have the potential to change the way health care is currently delivered. Although smart health monitoring systems automate patient monitoring tasks and, thereby improve the patient workflow management, their efficiency in clinical settings is still debatable. This paper presents a review of smart health monitoring systems and an overview of their design and modeling. Furthermore, a critical analysis of the efficiency, clinical acceptability, strategies and recommendations on improving current health monitoring systems will be presented. The main aim is to review current state of the art monitoring systems and to perform extensive and an in-depth analysis of the findings in the area of smart health monitoring systems. In order to achieve this, over fifty different monitoring systems have been selected, categorized, classified and compared. Finally, major advances in the system design level have been discussed, current issues facing health care providers, as well as the potential challenges to health monitoring field will be identified and compared to other similar systems.


Question: A systematic review of innovative information visualization techniques for electronic health record data.

Title: Frequency of Adverse Outcomes and Substandard Care in Hospitalized Patients: Findings from the Harvard Medical Practice Study

Context: This study forms part of a broader interdisciplinary exploration into medical harm and malpractice litigation. It aimed to quantify the prevalence of adverse outcomes, defined as injuries stemming from medical treatment, and to identify those cases specifically attributable to substandard or negligent care.

Methodology: A systematic review of 30,121 medical records, randomly selected from 51 acute care hospitals in New York State in 1984, was conducted. The study then extrapolated population-based estimates of injuries, analyzing rates based on patient demographics and physician specialties.

Findings: Adverse outcomes were identified in 3.7% of hospitalizations (95% confidence interval, 3.2 to 4.2), with 27.6% of these incidents linked to negligence (95% confidence interval, 22.5 to 32.6). While 70.5% of adverse outcomes resulted in temporary disabilities lasting under six months, 2.6% led to permanent disabilities, and 13.6% were fatal. The proportion of adverse outcomes due to negligence increased with the severity of injuries (Wald test chi 2 = 21.04, P < 0.0001). Using weighted totals, it was estimated that among the 2,671,863 patients discharged from New York hospitals in 1984, there were 98,609 adverse outcomes, including 27,179 involving negligence. The incidence of adverse outcomes was found to increase with patient age (P < 0.0001), and the rate of negligence was notably higher among the elderly (P < 0.01). Significant variations in adverse outcome rates were observed across different clinical specialties (P < 0.0001), but the percentage attributed to negligence remained consistent.

Conclusion: A considerable number of patients are harmed by medical interventions, with a significant portion of these injuries arising from substandard care. This underscores the critical need for continuous improvement in medical practices to enhance patient safety and quality of care.

This article surveys the history and current state of the art of visualization in meteorology, focusing on visualization techniques and tools used for meteorological data analysis. We examine characteristics of meteorological data and analysis tasks, describe the development of computer graphics methods for visualization in meteorology from the 1960s to today, and visit the state of the art of visualization techniques and tools in operational weather forecasting and atmospheric research. We approach the topic from both the visualization and the meteorological side, showing visualization techniques commonly used in meteorological practice, and surveying recent studies in visualization research aimed at meteorological applications. Our overview covers visualization techniques from the fields of display design, 3D visualization, flow dynamics, feature-based visualization, comparative visualization and data fusion, uncertainty and ensemble visualization, interactive visual analysis, efficient rendering, and scalability and reproducibility. We discuss demands and challenges for visualization research targeting meteorological data analysis, highlighting aspects in demonstration of benefit, interactive visual analysis, seamless visualization, ensemble visualization, 3D visualization, and technical issues.

New systems are designed with improved quality or features. However, not every new system lives to its pre-development expectations when tested with end-users. The evaluation of the first version of our LOCO-Analyst tool for providing teachers with feedback on students learning activities and performance led to the enhancing the visualization features of the tool. The second evaluation of the improved tool allowed us to see how the improvements affect the user perceptions of the tool. Here, we present the qualitative results of our two evaluations. The results show that educators find the kinds of feedback implemented in the tool informative and they value the mix of textual and graphical representations of different kinds of feedback provided by the tool.

In recent years, Distributed Data Mining (DDM) has evolved in large space aiming at minimizing computation cost and memory overhead in processing huge geographically distributed data. There are two approaches of DDM -- homogeneous and heterogeneous classifier approach. This paper presents implementation of four homogeneous classifier techniques for DDM with different Electronic Health Records (EHRs) homogeneous datasets namely diabetes, hepatitis, hypothyroid and further analyzing results based on metric evaluation.

The PubMed literature database is a valuable source of information for scientific research. It is rich in biomedical literature with more than 24 million citations. Data-mining of voluminous literature is a challenging task. Although several text-mining algorithms have been developed in recent years with focus on data visualization, they have limitations such as speed, are rigid and are not available in the open source. We have developed an R package, pubmed.mineR, wherein we have combined the advantages of existing algorithms, overcome their limitations, and offer user flexibility and link with other packages in Bioconductor and the Comprehensive R Network (CRAN) in order to expand the user capabilities for executing multifaceted approaches. Three case studies are presented, namely, ‘Evolving role of diabetes educators’, ‘Cancer risk assessment’ and ‘Dynamic concepts on disease and comorbidity’ to illustrate the use of pubmed.mineR. The package generally runs fast with small elapsed times in regular workstations even on large corpus sizes and with compute intensive functions. The pubmed.mineR is available at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pubmed.mineR .

Context : Exploration of user interfaces has attracted a considerable attention in Semantic Web research in the last several years. However, the overall impact of these research efforts and the level of the maturity of their results are still unclear. Objective: This study aims at surveying existing research on Semantic Web user interfaces in order to synthesise their results, assess the level of the maturity of the research results, and identify needs for future research. Method : This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review and mapping study on Semantic Web user interfaces published between 2003 and 2011. After collecting a corpus of 87 papers, the collected papers are analysed through four main dimensions: general information such as sources, types and time of publication; covered research topics; quality of evaluations; and finally, used research methods and reported rigour of their use. Results: Based on only the obtained data, the paper provides a high level overview of the works reviewed, a detailed quality assessment of papers involving human subjects and a discussion of the identified gaps in the analysed papers and draws promising venues for future research. Conclusion: We arrive at two main conclusions: important gaps exist which hinder a wide adoption of Semantic Web technologies (e.g. lack user interfaces based on semantic technologies for social and mobile applications) and experimental research hardly used any proven theories and instruments specifically designed for investigating technology acceptance.

Event sequence data analysis is common in many domains, including web and software development, transportation, and medical care. Few have investigated visualization techniques for comparative analysis of multiple event sequence datasets. Grounded in the real-world characteristics of web clickstream data, we explore visualization techniques for comparison of two clickstream datasets collected on different days or from users with different demographics. Through iterative design with web analysts, we designed MatrixWave, a matrix-based representation that allows analysts to get an overview of differences in traffic patterns and interactively explore paths through the website. We use color to encode differences and size to offer context over traffic volume. User feedback on MatrixWave is positive. Our study participants made fewer errors with MatrixWave and preferred it over the more familiar Sankey diagram.

Medical researchers are coming to appreciate that many diseases are in fact complex, heterogeneous syndromes composed of subpopulations that express different variants of a related complication. Longitudinal data extracted from individual electronic health records (EHR) offer an exciting new way to study subtle differences in the way these diseases progress over time. In this paper, we focus on answering two questions that can be asked using these databases of longitudinal EHR data. First, we want to understand whether there are individuals with similar disease trajectories and whether there are a small number of degrees of freedom that account for differences in trajectories across the population. Second, we want to understand how important clinical outcomes are associated with disease trajectories. To answer these questions, we propose the Disease Trajectory Map (DTM), a novel probabilistic model that learns low-dimensional representations of sparse and irregularly sampled longitudinal data. We propose a stochastic variational inference algorithm for learning the DTM that allows the model to scale to large modern medical datasets. To demonstrate the DTM, we analyze data collected on patients with the complex autoimmune disease, scleroderma. We find that DTM learns meaningful representations of disease trajectories and that the representations are significantly associated with important clinical outcomes.

In this paper we propose ValueCharts, a set of visualizations and interactive techniques intended to support decision-makers in inspecting linear models of preferences and evaluation. Linear models are popular decision-making tools for individuals, groups and organizations. In Decision Analysis, they help the decision-maker analyze preferential choices under conflicting objectives. In Economics and the Social Sciences, similar models are devised to rank entities according to an evaluative index of interest. The fundamental goal of building models expressing preferences and evaluations is to help the decision-maker organize all the information relevant to a decision into a structure that can be effectively analyzed. However, as models and their domain of application grow in complexity, model analysis can become a very challenging task. We claim that ValueCharts will make the inspection and application of these models more natural and effective. We support our claim by showing how ValueCharts effectively enable a set of basic tasks that we argue are at the core of analyzing and understanding linear models of preferences and evaluation.

potential to be a powerful tool for the visualization of burgeoning scientific data sets and models. In this article we sketch a research agenda for the hardware and software technology underlying IVR for scientific visualization. In contrast to Brooks’ excellent survey last year, which reported on the state of IVR and provided concrete examples of its production use, this article is somewhat speculative. We don’t present solutions but rather a progress report, a hope, and a call to action, to help scientists cope with a major crisis that threatens to impede their progress. Brooks’ examples show that the technology has only recently started to mature—in his words, it “barely works.” IVR is used for walkthroughs of buildings and other structures, virtual prototyping (vehicles such as cars, tractors, and airplanes), medical applications (surgical visualization, planning, and training), “experiences” applied as clinical therapy (reliving Vietnam experiences to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, treating agoraphobia), and entertainment. Building on Brooks’ work, here we concentrate on why scientific visualization is also a good application area for IVR. First we’ll briefly review scientific visualization as a means of understanding models and data, then discuss the problem of exploding data set size, both from sensors and from simulation runs, and the consequent demand for new approaches. We see IVR as part of the solution: as a richer visualization and interaction environment, it can potentially enhance the scientist’s ability to manipulate the levels of abstraction necessary for multi-terabyte and petabyte data sets and to formulate hypotheses to guide very long simulation runs. In short, IVR has the potential to facilitate a more balanced human-computer partnership that maximizes bandwidth to the brain by more fully engaging the human sensorium. We argue that IVR remains in a primitive state of development and is, in the case of CAVEs and tiled projection displays, very expensive and therefore not in routine use. (We use the term cave to denote both the original CAVE developed at the University of Illinois’ Electronic Visualization Laboratory and CAVE-style derivatives.) Evolving hardware and software technology may, however, enable IVR to become as ubiquitous as 3D graphics workstations—once exotic and very expensive—are today. Finally, we describe a research agenda, first for the technologies that enable IVR and then for the use of IVR for scientific visualization. Punctuating the discussion are sidebars giving examples of scientific IVR work currently under way at Brown University that addresses some of the research challenges, as well as other sidebars on data set size growth and IVR interaction metaphors.

Querying the Semantic Web and analyzing the query results are often complex tasks that can be greatly facilitated by visual interfaces. A major challenge in the design of these interfaces is to provide intuitive and efficient interaction support without limiting too much the analytical degrees of freedom. This paper introduces SemLens, a visual tool that combines scatter plots and semantic lenses to overcome this challenge and to allow for a simple yet powerful analysis of RDF data. The scatter plots provide a global overview on an object collection and support the visual discovery of correlations and patterns in the data. The semantic lenses add dimensions for local analysis of subsets of the objects. A demo accessing DBpedia data is used for illustration.