Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Last month we went to Amsterdam to address a visualization challenge put forward by the European Network for the Radar Surveillance of Animal Movement (ENRAM). These good people are working towards an automated Europe-wide bird migration observation system using weather radars. There are plenty good reasons for doing so, not the least because birds tend to migrate at night, making them hard to observe visually. For this project we got to work with a dataset containing observations from 5 weather radars in Belgium and the Netherlands over a 7-day period. You can see both static, interactive and animated results on timamp.github.io.

Now image this on a Europe-wide scale…

Yesterday WIRED posted an article featuring the GLEAMviz data visualizations I worked on at ISI Foundation, describing them as ‘mesmerizing’.

Unfortunately the concerned graphics are incorrectly attributed. They are in fact the result of a collaborative effort by developers and scientists at both the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy and the Mobs Lab at Northeastern University, USA, with the support of both European and American research funding agencies.

To end on a positive note:Bill Gates seems to like our work, given his tweet and facebook post.

The Epidemic Planet visualisation/installation is currently on show in Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight, an exhibition on scientific data visualisation. The show explores “how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time”. It runs from 20 February till 26 May 2014 at The British Library in London.

For the new version shown in this exhibition, the GLEAMviz-team provided new scenarios with outbreaks in London and the Isles of Scilly, while I redesigned the interface and the cartographic renderings. Screenshots of the results are shown below.

This control panel is provided on a touch-screen. It allows the visitors to select and compare different epidemic scenarios.

 

This cartographic animation shows the evolution of the simulated scenarios.

Some appearances in the press:

• BBC Future – 19 February, 2014
  
• The Independent – 19 February, 2014
• Design Week – 19 February, 2014
• New Scientist – 21 February, 2014
• WIRED.it – 22 February, 2014
• Gizmodo – 26 February, 2014
• The Guardian – Data Blog – 27 February, 2014

Quotes:

• Finally checked out Beautiful Science #dataviz exhibit at @britishlibrary. short & sweet. especially liked epidemic simulator by @gleamviz. Andre Tartar, Economic Data Editor at Bloomberg News and New York Magazine, 30 March 2014.

Sometimes situations evolve at warp speed. After one year of teaching, I became the program director of Multec, the new professional bachelor in multimedia and communication technology at the Erasmushogeschool Brussel. I replaced Frank Lanssens, who became the director of the new Design & Technology department that hosts the Multec program.

In october I started teaching Creative Programming in the brand new Multec programme at the Erasmus University College in Brussels. This programme aims to train professional bachelors in multimedia and communication technologies. In this training we equally stress technology, creativity and design. My first course introduces the students to the art of structured creative programming in the Processing environment.

 

 

The first in a series of workshops in which we will investigate the language of network representations, will be held in October at the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels. Most of the participants will be students of the “Master Atelier Pluridisciplinaire Pratiques Graphiques et Complexité Scientifique”, but there are some places available for external participants. Visit narranova.org/lonr for more information.

I will be teaching at BIG DIVE, a four-week training program to boost the technical skills needed to dive into the BIG DATA universe. This program will be held in October in Turin, Italy.

An updated version of our Epidemic Planet exhibit is currently shown in the Epidèmia show in CosmoCaixa, the awesome science museum in Barcelona.

 

High-Resolution Measurements of Face-to-Face Contact Patterns in a Primary School.

in: PLoS ONE 6(8): e23176. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023176, August 2011.

authors: Juliette Stehlé, Nicolas Voirin, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Lorenzo Isella, Jean-François Pinton, Marco Quaggiotto, Wouter Van den Broeck, Corinne Régis, Bruno Lina and Philippe Vanhems.

Simulation of an SEIR infectious disease model on the dynamic contact network of conference attendees.

in: BMC Medicine, 9(87), July 2011.

authors: Juliette Stehlé, Nicolas Voirin, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Vittoria Colizza, Lorenzo Isella, Corinne Régis, Jean-François Pinton, Nagham Khanafer, Wouter Van den Broeck, and Philippe Vanhems.

On the Dynamics of Human Proximity for Data Diffusion in Ad-Hoc Networks.

in: Ad Hoc Networks, doi: 10.1016/ j.adhoc.2011.06.003, june 2011.

authors: André Panisson, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Wouter Van den Broeck, Giancarlo Ruffo, and Rossano Schifanella.

Close Encounters in a Pediatric Ward: Measuring Face-to-Face Proximity and Mixing Patterns with Wearable Sensors.

in: PLoS ONE 6(2): e17144. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0017144, March 2011.

authors: Lorenzo Isella, Mariateresa Romano, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Vittoria Colizza, Wouter Van den Broeck, Francesco Gesualdo, Elisabetta Pandolfi, Lucilla Ravà, Caterina Rizzo, Alberto Eugenio Tozzi.

Coming March I will give a talk in the ‘Map me if you will’ seminar at the Pixelache Festival of electronic art and subcultures in Helsinki. I will also participate in the related Mapping in Progress workshop on current mapping projects such as Practice Mapping (see this blog entry). I’m really looking forward to both opportunities for auspicious interaction with the community and hope you will be there as well!