Archive for the ‘Projects’ 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.

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

 

In the SocioPatterns gallery we published a visualization of sixty-nine days of face-to-face contact activity among more than 30,000 persons based on data collected during the INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. Read more…

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!

I just published a new project page that provides an overview of the context, objectives and results of the Practice Mapping project, which took part in the Interactivos? workshop in LABoral, Gijon, Spain, in April 2010.

Data Driven Dynamical Networks

From September 26 till October 1, we organized the Data Driven Dynamical Network workshop in Les Houches, France. We brought together a group of people from a variety of scientific backgrounds to share insights in the collection, analysis, application and visualization of data driven dynamical networks.

Connecting the Dots

On 22 October, I gave a talk about Visualizing SocioPatterns at Connecting the Dots, a Network Visualization Symposium at Harvard University, organized by Samuel Arbesman, Michael Barnett, and Jukka-Pekka Onnela from the Harvard Medical School.

GLEaMviz Simulator v2.6

We recently released a new version -v2.6- of the GLEaMviz Simulator application in which we provide an improved visualization of the epidemic spreading. The following movie provides some examples of how this new visualization shows the number of new cases at the cell-level, instead of the less precise basin-level incidence representation used in the previous versions.

The user can now also select from a number of backdrop maps onto which the visualization is projected, details of which are shown in the following figure. The left option is based on the NASA Blue Marble map, while the other two provide a more neutral base onto which the cell-level cases can be inspected with greater visual accuracy.

Epidemic Planet

A new version of the Epidemic Planet exhibit, now with the new visualization of GLEaMviz Simulator v2.6, was shown in the Exhibition hall of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC10), that was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from November 13th to 19th. The exhibit was hosted at the booth of the Indiana University, partner of the GLEaMviz project.

The Epidemic Planet is currently also shown in CosmoCaixa Mòbil – Tecnorevolución, a traveling exhibition by the Cosmo Caixa science museum that will set up show in a number of cities in Spain.

We recently released a publicly accessible version of the GLEaMviz Simulator. This client-server system allows its user to design, execute and visualize simulations of world-wide epidemic outbreaks. I have updated my related project page, providing a overview of this novel system’s functionality. You can, of course, also try it out yourself.

Our principal SocioPatterns paper has been published on PLoS ONE:

• Dynamics of Person-to-Person Interactions from Distributed RFID Sensor Networks.

We also recently published two papers on the Live Social Semantics experiment in which the SocioPatterns platform was used:

• Semantics, sensors, and the social web: The live social semantics experiments.

• The Live Social Semantics application: a platform for integrating face-to-face presence with on-line social networking.