Author Archive

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.

The interactive data visualizations I worked on for the GLEAMviz project are featured in a case study in this new book on information design (page 74-77).

Design for Information: An Introduction to the Histories, Theories, and Best Practices Behind Effective Information Visualizations, by Isabel Meirelles.

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 workshop “Investigating the Language of Network Representations” at the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels is well under way and the results are shaping up great. These are some pictures of the “work(shop) in progress”.

I’ve been adding some new project pages covering:

• my artistic collaboration with Boy & Erik Stappaerts (1995-2000),
• J:ACK, An open-source ActionScript component library (2000-2003), and
• The Flash Fortress Development Kit and Demo Application (2000-2001).

Proposed set-up for an exhibition in collaboration with Boy & Erik Stappaerts.

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.