Year after year, technologies are evolving in an incredible rapid pace, becoming faster, more complex, more accurate and more immersive. Looking back just a decade, especially interaction technologies have made a major leap. Just two years ago in 2013, after being researched for quite some time, the hype around virtual reality (VR) arouse renewed enthusiasm, finally reaching mainstream attention as the so called head-mounted displays (HMD), devices worn on the head  to grant a visual peek into the virtual world, gain more and more acceptance with the end-user. Currently, humans interact with computers in a very counter-intuitive two dimensional way. The ability to experience digital content in the humans most natural manner, by simply looking around and perceiving information from their surroundings, has the potential to be a major game changer in how we perceive and eventually interact with digital information. However, this confronts designers and developers with new challenges of how to apply these exciting technologies, supporting interaction mechanisms to naturally explore digital information in the virtual world, ultimately overcoming real world boundaries. Within the virtual world, the only limit is our imagination. This thesis investigates an approach of how to naturally interact and explore information based on open data within an immersive virtual reality environment using a head-mounted display and vision-based motion controls. For this purpose, an immersive VR application visualizing information as a network of European capital cities has been implemented, offering interaction through gesture input. The application lays a major focus on the exploration of the generated network and the consumption of the displayed information. While the conducted user interaction study with eleven participants investigated their acceptance of the developed prototype, estimating their workload and examining their explorative behaviour, the additional dialog with five experts in the form of explorative discussions provided further feedback towards the prototype’s design and concept. The results indicate the participants’ enthusiasm and excitement towards the novelty and intuitiveness of exploring information in a less traditional way than before, while challenging them with the applied interface and interaction design in a positive manner. The design and concept were also accepted through the experts, valuing the idea and implementation. They provided constructive feedback towards the visualization of the information as well as emphasising and encouraging to be even bolder, making more usage of the available 3D environment. Finally, the thesis discusses these findings and proposes recommendations for future work.

[pt] Esta pesquisa analisa o campo do design especialmente no que tange à produção de visualização de informação para meios digitais no âmbito do jornalismo, com o olhar voltado para a retórica visual dessas imagens. Relacionada com o advento das novas mídias - que trouxe a viabilidade de representações visuais a partir de bases de dados dinâmicas - a pesquisa visa contribuir para uma discussão ainda incipiente em nível global (e especialmente nacional) dado o cenário tecnológico contemporâneo, caracterizado pela multimidialidade e pela crescente popularidade de novos dispositivos computacionais, interativos e portáteis. Para tal, empreende uma reflexão teórica que passa pelo estabelecimento da sociedade de informação no último século; apresenta a transição das velhas para as novas mídias, bem como seu impacto no jornalismo e, por consequência, na visualização de informação produzida para esses meios; e investiga ainda, o campo da imagem e da compreensão de informação através da retórica visual. A partir dessa moldura teórica, esta dissertação apresenta uma proposta de organização do uso da retórica visual de forma consciente por designers, através de uma taxonomia baseada em estudos anteriores. E finalmente, com base nessa proposta, analisa determinados casos de uso, classificando visualizações de informação produzidas por alguns veículos de mídia, do Brasil e do exterior. / [en] This research investigates the Design domain especially on information visualization (InfoVis) production to digital media through journalism, focusing on images’ visual rhetoric. Concerned with the advent of new media - that brought the viability of dynamic data onto visual representations – this study wants to contribute to an initial global debate (and particularly in Brazil) in view of the contemporary technologic scenario characterized by multimediality and growing popularity of new interactive and portable computational devices. For that, it does a theoretical study on information society; it presents the transition between old and new media, as well as the impact on journalism and, in consequence, on information visualization production by new media; and also, investigates the image field and information comprehension through visual rhetoric. Within this theoretical frame, the dissertation proposes a conscious and organized use of visual rhetoric for designers, with a taxonomy based on earlier researches. Finally, based on this proposal, this study analyses some usage cases, classifying information visualization produced by some brazilian and international media companies.

Ce travail de thèse de doctorat est placé dans le domaine de la Géovisualisation utilisé pour mettre en œuvre des systèmes de aide à la décision territoriale. Ce travail de recherche est né grâce à l'établissement d’un accord entre l’Université Tor Vergata de Rome, et l’INSA (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées), de Lyon. La co-tutelle de cette thèse est née pour la nécessité d’une approche multidisciplinaire à le sujet de recherche, en profitant des compétences en matière d'urbanisme, de l’environnement et de la modélisation de territoire à l'école doctorale ‘Geoinformazione’ de l'Université de Tor Vergata, et en utilisant d’avantage les compétences dans les systèmes d'information spatiale et de la géovisualisation au laboratoire LIRIS de l'INSA. Malgré ces avantages, l’un des problèmes les plus courants en visualisation de l’information est de représenter les données d’une manière claire et compréhensible. Actuallement il ya peu de fondations scientifiques pour guider les chercheurs dans la conception visuelle de données spatiales ; il existe des méthodes systématiques limitée pour évaluer l'efficacité des solutions proposées. Dans ce travail de recherche de doctorat, des contributions seront fournis à la création d'une méthode d'évaluation systématique pour évaluer et développer des affichages visuels efficaces. Dans ce contexte l’objectif de la recherche était de trouver une méthode simple et empirique - un test en ligne - qui pourrait être facilement reproductible pour differentes scenarios, pour soutenir l’administration publique dans différents contextes et pour différentes tâches. / This PhD research work is placed in the domain of Geovisualization used to implement Territorial Intelligence and decision support systems. This research work was born through the establishment of an agreement between Tor Vergata University, Rome, and INSA (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées), Lyon. The co-supervision of this thesis was born from the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach to the research topic, taking advantage of the skills in urban planning, environment and territory modeling at the Geoinformation doctoral school of Tor Vergata University, and taking advantage of the skills in Spatial Information Systems and Geovisualization at the LIRIS Laboratory of INSA. The motivation that led us to deal with this research topic was the perception of a lack of systematic methods and universally approved empirical experiments in data visualization domain. The experiments should consider different typologies of data, different environmental contexts, different indicators and methods of representations, etc., in order to support expert users in decision making, in the urban and territorial planning and in the implementation of environmental policies. In modern societies, we have to deal with a great amount of data every day and Geovisualization permits the management, exploration and display of big and heterogeneous data in an interactive way that facilitates decision making processes. Geovisualization gives the opportunity to the user to change the visual appearance of the maps, to explore different layers of data and to highlight problems in some areas by the citizens. Despite these advantages, one of the most common problems in Information Visualization is to represent data in a clear and comprehensible way. Spatial data have a complex structure that includes spatial component, thematic attributes, and often the temporal component Actually there are limited scientific foundations to guide researchers in visual design of spatial data, and there are limited systematic and standard methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the solutions proposed. In this Phd research work, some contributions will be provided to the creation of a systematic assessment method to evaluate and to develop effective geovisualization displays. An empirical evaluation test is proposed to assess the effectiveness of some map displays, analyzing the use of three elements of visual design: 1. the spatial indicators to be represented and their context of visualization, 2. the physical dimensions of map displays, 3. the visual variables to represent different layers of information.

Neste trabalho são exploradas diversas técnicas de escalonamento multidimensional (MDS), com o objetivo de estudar sua aplicabilidade no mapeamento de dados genômicos resultantes da técnica RFLP-PCR, sendo esse mapeamento realizado em espaços de baixa dimensionalidade (2D ou 3D) com o fim de aproveitar a habilidade de análise e interpretação visual que possuem os seres humanos. Foi realizada uma análise comparativa de diversos algoritmos MDS, visando sua aptidão para mapear dados genômicos. Esta análise compreendeu o estudo de alguns índices de desempenho como a precisão no mapeamento, o custo computacional e a capacidade de induzir bons agrupamentos. Para a realização dessa análise foi desenvolvida a ferramenta \"MDSExplorer\", a qual integra os algoritmos estudados e várias opções que permitem comparar os algoritmos e visualizar os mapeamentos. Á análise realizada sobre diversos bancos de dados citados na literatura, sugerem que o algoritmo LANDMARK possui o menor tempo computacional, uma precisão de mapeamento similar aos demais algoritmos, e uma boa capacidade de manter as estruturas existentes nos dados. Finalmente, o MDSExplorer foi usado para mapear um banco de dados genômicos: o banco de estirpes de bactérias fixadoras de nitrogênio, pertencentes ao gênero Bradyrhizobium, com objetivo de ajudar o especialista a inferir visualmente alguma taxonomia nessas estirpes. Os resultados na redução dimensional desse banco de dados sugeriram que a informação relevante (acima dos 60% da variância acumulada) para as regiões 16S, 23S e IGS estaria nas primeiras 5, 4 e 9 dimensões respectivamente. / In this work were studied various Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) techniques intended to apply in the mapping of genomics data obtained of RFLP-PCR technique. This mapping is done in a low dimensional space (2D or 3D), and has the intention of exploiting the visual human capability on analysis and synthesis. A comparative analysis of diverse algorithms MDS was carried out in order to devise its ubiquity in representing genomics data. This analysis covers the study of some indices of performance such as: the precision in the mapping, the computational cost and the capacity to induce good groupings. The purpose of this analysis was developed a software tool called \"MDSExplorer\", which integrates various MDS algorithms and some options that allow to compare the algorithms and to visualize the mappings. The analysis, carried out over diverse datasets cited in the literature, suggest that the algorithm LANDMARK has the lowest computational time, a good precision in the mapping, and a tendency to maintain the existing structures in the data. Finally, MDSExplorer was used to mapping a real genomics dataset: the RFLP-PRC images of a Brazilian collection of bacterial strains belonging to the genus Bradyrhizobium (known by their capability to transform the nitrogen of the atmosphere into compounds useful for the host plants), with the objective to aid the specialist to infer visually a taxonomy in these strains. The results in reduction of dimensionality in this data base, suggest that the relevant information (above 60% of variance accumulated) to the region 16S, 23S and IGS is around 5, 4 and 9 dimensions respectively.

O uso da computação em uma variedade cada vez maior de aplicações fez com que os Sistemas de Gerenciamento de Bases de Dados (SGBD) passassem a ser utilizados para armazenar os mais diversos tipos de dados complexos, como imagens, sons e cadeias de DNA entre outros. Consultas baseadas em relações de ordem total ou igualdade não podem ser aplicadas ou tem aplicações limitadas quando executadas nestes conjuntos de dados. Logo, efetua-se consultas por similaridade baseadas no conteúdo de dados desses tipos. Se tais conjuntos de dados podem ser representados em um espaço métrico, é possível utilizar os Métodos de Acesso Métricos (MAM), como a Slim-Tree, a M-Tree e a DBM-Tree, para otimizar as consultas por similaridade. Porém, os MAM são muito difíceis de compreender e analisar devido à complexidade de suas estruturas. Esta dissertação apresenta um sistema de visualização que permite a inspeção visual da organização e do comportamento de MAM, provendo aos desenvolvedores e administradores de SGBD uma forma rápida e fácil para obter informações essenciais sobre estas estruturas que podem levar a melhorias no desempenho de consultas e outras operações. / The use of computers by an increasing variety of applications led the Database Management Systems (DBMS) to be used to store a wide range of complex data types, such as images, sounds, DNA chains, etc. Queries based on the total order relationship and/or equality can not be applied or have a limited range of applications when performed over these datasets. It is necessary to use similarity queries based on the contents of the data. If these datasets can be represented as metric spaces, it is possible to use the Metric Access Methods (MAM), such as the Slim-Tree, the M-Tree and the DBM-Tree, to optimize similarity queries. However, MAM are very hard to understand and analyze due to their complex structures. This work presents a visualization system that allows the visual inspection of the organization and the behavior of MAM. The usage of this system provides to MAM developers and database administrators, an easy and fast way to acquire information about key aspects of these structures, which can lead to improvements on the performance of queries and other operations.

Desde a definção do problema de obtenção de regras de associação, vários algoritmos eficientes foram introduzidos para tratá-lo. Entretanto, ainda hoje o problema apresenta várias dificuldades práticas para os mineradores, como a determinação de limiares adequados de suporte mínimo e confiança mínima, a manipulação de grandes conjuntos de regras, e a compreensão de regras (especialmente aquelas contendo muitos itens). Para tratar estes problemas, pesquisadores têm investigado a aplicação de técnicas interativas, sumarização (de conjuntos de regras) e representações visuais. Entretanto, nenhuma abordagem na qual os usuários podem entender e controlar o processo por meio da interação com o algoritmo analítico ao longo de sua execução foi introduzida. Neste trabalho, é introduzida uma abordagem interativa para extração e exploração de regras de associação que insere o usuário no processo por meio de: execução interativa do Apriori ; seleção interativa de itemsets freqüentes; extração de regras baseada em itemsets e orientada por agrupamentos de itemsets similares; e exploração de regras aos pares. Para validar a abordagem, foram realizados diversos estudos, apoiados pelo Sistema \'I IND.2\' E, com o objetivo de: comparar a abordagem interativa, sob diversos aspectos, com uma abordagem convencional de obtenção de regras de associação; avaliar o efeito de variar alguns parâmetros do processo nos resultados finais; e mostrar a aplicação dos recursos oferecidos em situações reais e com usuários reais. Os resultados indicam que a abordagem apresentada é adequada, tanto em cenários exploratórios quanto em cenários em que há um direcionamento inicial para o processo, à execução de certas tarefas de extração de regras de associação, pois: provém recursos capazes de evitar execuções inteiras do algoritmo antes que os resultados sejam analisados; gera conjuntos de regras mais compactos; preserva a cobertura de itemsets; favorece a reformulação de tarefas ou a formulação de novas tarefas; e provê meios para comparação visual de regras, aumentando o poder de análise do minerador / Since the definition of the association rule mining problem, many efficient algorithms have been introduced to deal with it. However, the problem still presents many practical difficulties to the miners, such as the determination of suitable minimum support and minimum confidence thresholds, manipulation of large rule sets, and comprehension of rules (specially those containing many items). In order to deal with these problems, researchers have been investigating the application of interactive techniques, sumarization (of rule sets) and visual representations. Nonetheless, no approach in which users can understand and control the process through interaction with the analytical algorithm along its execution has been introduced. We introduce an interactive approach to extract and explore association rules that inserts the user into the process through: interactive execution of the Apriori ; interactive selection of frequent itemsets; itemset-based and cluster-oriented extraction of rules; and pairwise exploration of rules. To validate the approach, several studies have been conducted, supported by the \'I IND.2\' E System, aiming at: comparing the interactive approach, under several aspects, with a conventional approach to obtain association rules; evaluate the effect of different execution parameters in the final results; and illustrate its application in real situations and with real users. Results of these studies indicate that the approach is adequate, both in exploratory scenarios and in scenarios in which there is an initial guidance for the process, to the execution of certain association rule extraction tasks, because: it provides resources to avoid complete algorithm executions before results are analyzed; generates more compact rule sets for exploration; preserves rule diversity; favors the reformulation of tasks; and provides support for rule comparison, enhancing analysis capability for miners

A pesquisa busca alcançar novos aportes para estudos em infografia jornalística à medida que investiga qualidades, atividades profissionais e tecnologias envolvidas na produção de uma modalidade infográfica emergente, o infovis, contextualizada pelas potencialidades do meio digital e on-line, e sintonizada com práticas comunicacionais contemporâneas, que supera, em determinados aspectos, modelos infográficos anteriores. Com vistas a atingir nosso objetivo investigativo adotamos metodologia de pesquisa em duas etapas: 1) revisão conceitual de três referências teóricas fundamentais - visualização da informação, infografia jornalística e interatividade; e 2) proposta de análise de infovis com base na técnica de pesquisa de análise de conteúdo. Assim, o corpus empírico é constituído por 270 infovis de conteúdo temático político, sobretudo eleitoral, de quatro sítios jornalísticos - The New York Times, The Guardian, Folha de S. Paulo e O Estado de S. Paulo - veiculados entre jan. 2010 e dez. 2013. A partir de sistemático procedimento de análise elaborado segundo unidades e subunidades analíticas orientadas pelas três dimensões teóricas do dispositivo infovis (input, interface e output), obtivemos respostas codificadas para todas as peças do corpus. A leitura do formulário de análise preenchido gerou resultados e inferências sobre nossa amostra que apontam para aspectos produtivos pioneiros em infografia, como maior abertura comunicacional à audiência, emprego de ferramentas on-line e gratuitas para produção de infovis e utilização de tecnologia de atualização contínua dos dados visualizados. / The research seeks to offer new contributions for studies on journalistic infographics by investigating the qualities, professional activities, and technologies involved in the production of an emerging form of infographics, the infovis, within the context of the potential of online environments, in synch with contemporary communications practices, and which overcomes, in certain aspects, previous infographics models. In order to meet our research objective, we employed a two-stage method: 1) conceptual review of three fundamental theoretical subjects - information visualization, journalistic infographics, and interactivity; and 2) a proposal for the analysis of infovis based on the technique of content analysis research. Thus, the empirical corpus is made up of 270 examples of infovis with political thematic content, mainly electoral, from four journalistic websites - The New York Times, The Guardian, Folha de S. Paulo and O Estado de S. Paulo - published between January 2010 and December 2013. Based on a systematic procedure for analysis, organized by analytical units and subunits, as well as by the three theoretical facets of the infovis device (input, interface and output), we obtained codified responses for all pieces within the corpus. From the reading of the completed analysis form, results and inferences were generated for our sample, which point to pioneering productive features in infographics, such as greater communicative openness with the audience, use of free online tools for the production of infovis, and use of real-time technology for on-screen data

Ferramentas e técnicas de visualização promovem uma análise de dados mais efetiva pelo fato de explorar a capacidade humana na percepção de padrões, principalmente em representações gráficas. Muitos fenômenos são associados a algum tipo de referência, temporal ou geográfica, que pode oferecer informação importante quando são submetidos a processos de análise. Este trabalho aborda representações visuais de dados geradas por técnicas de projeção multidimensional, e propõe uma estratégia para o tratamento diferenciado das referências temporais ou geográficas presentes em conjuntos de dados, no processo de gerar uma projeção multidimensional. Foi proposta e implementada uma variação da técnica Least Square Projection (LSP) que evidencia a informação das referências e permite ao usuário interagir com os mapas visuais gerados, bem como diversas funcionalidades que auxiliam no processo de análise exploratória. A nova abordagem é ilustrada por meio de estudos de caso envolvendo bases de dados temporais e com referências geográficas, em que foi possível observar o comportamento global dos elementos, bem como comportamentos de elementos ou grupos de elementos de interesse. Limitações da estratégia proposta também são discutidas / Visualization tools and techniques promote more effective data analysis by exploiting the human visual perception capabilities in detecting patterns in graphical representations. Many phenomena generate data that include temporal or geographical references, which are likely to provide important information in data analysis procedures. This work addresses data visualizations generated with multidimensional projections, proposing a strategy to handle temporal and geographical references present in multidimensional data sets, when generating multidimensional projections. The Least Squares Projection (LSP) technique was extended to explicitly handle the reference information and represent it in the visual maps, and a set of supporting analysis functions have been implemented. The proposed approach is illustrated through case studies on multidimensional data sets, in which it was possible to observe the global behavior of the elements, as well as individual behavior of elements or groups of elements of interest

Scene understanding attempts to produce a textual description of visible and latent concepts in an image to describe the real meaning of the scene. Concepts are either objects, events or relations depicted in an image. To recognize concepts, the decision of object detection algorithm must be further enhanced from visual similarity to semantical compatibility. Semantically relevant concepts convey the most consistent meaning of the scene. Object detectors analyze visual properties (e.g., pixel intensities, texture, color gradient) of sub-regions of an image to identify objects. The initially assigned objects names must be further examined to ensure they are compatible with each other and the scene. By enforcing inter-object dependencies (e.g., co-occurrence, spatial and semantical priors) and object to scene constraints as background information, a concept classifier predicts the most semantically consistent set of names for discovered objects. The additional background information that describes concepts is called context. In this dissertation, a framework for building context-based concept detection is presented that uses a combination of multiple contextual relationships to refine the result of underlying feature-based object detectors to produce most semantically compatible concepts. In addition to the lack of ability to capture semantical dependencies, object detectors suffer from high dimensionality of feature space that impairs them. Variances in the image (i.e., quality, pose, articulation, illumination, and occlusion) can also result in low-quality visual features that impact the accuracy of detected concepts. The object detectors used to build context-based framework experiments in this study are based on the state-of-the-art generative and discriminative graphical models. The relationships between model variables can be easily described using graphical models and the dependencies and precisely characterized using these representations. The generative context-based implementations are extensions of Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a leading topic modeling approach that is very effective in reduction of the dimensionality of the data. The discriminative contextbased approach extends Conditional Random Fields which allows efficient and precise construction of model by specifying and including only cases that are related and influence it. The dataset used for training and evaluation is MIT SUN397. The result of the experiments shows overall 15% increase in accuracy in annotation and 31% improvement in semantical saliency of the annotated concepts. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Submitted by admin tede (tede@pucgoias.edu.br) on 2017-06-01T12:20:54Z No. of bitstreams: 1 ELVIA NUNES RIBEIRO.pdf: 12426525 bytes, checksum: d4499bc7cc8a0340d5075c19261a8f7e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-01T12:20:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ELVIA NUNES RIBEIRO.pdf: 12426525 bytes, checksum: d4499bc7cc8a0340d5075c19261a8f7e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-16 / This research applies to the social network analysis metrics (SNA), information visualization (VI) and correlation analysis for development of diagnostics of the distance learning on social networks that occur in the virtual learning environment (AVA). The data were extracted directly from the database of the AVA, e-Proinfo. The use of R software version 3.3.1 was chosen for the implementation of the necessary scripts in this research. The R software proved to be a suitable and versatile choice for applications in networks, contemplating the options generally available in SNA specific tools and resources for handling, processing and implementation of new network solutions. The analysis of forum networks identified the intensity of individual and class participation. Non-parametric analysis applied found a high positive correlation between the grade of the student and his contributions to the forum, especially the centrality of output. The correlations of Spearman and Kendall were 0.7921 and 0.6261 respectively. The analysis of social networks, messaging and note tools and the establishment of contacts among the participants turned possible the identification of the level of their involvement in the course. This research contributes to knowledge management by highlighting social networks formed by communications data and course interactions. Access to social networks of a distance course enables the Manager to monitor the level of participation, exchanges of information and the construction of knowledge. This information is useful for the decision-making and can collaborate for educational development. / Esta pesquisa aplica as métricas de análise de redes sociais (ARS), visualização de informações (VI) e análise de correlação para realização de diagnósticos de um curso a distância, nas redes sociais que ocorrem no ambiente virtual de aprendizagem (AVA). Os dados foram extraídos diretamente do banco de dados do AVA, e-Proinfo. Optou-se pelo uso do software R, versão 3.3.1, para a implementação dos scripts necessários nesta pesquisa. O software R mostrou ser uma escolha adequada e versátil para aplicações em redes, contemplando as opções geralmente disponíveis nas ferramentas específicas de ARS e recursos para manipulação, tratamento e implementação de novas soluções de redes. As análises das redes de fórum permitiram identificar a intensidade das participações individuais e das turmas. As análises não paramétricas aplicadas constataram uma alta correlação positiva entre a nota do aluno e suas contribuições no fórum, principalmente, a centralidade de saída. As correlações de Spearman e Kendal foram de 0,7921 e 0,6261 respectivamente. As análises das redes sociais, das ferramentas de mensagem e de recados e o estabelecimento de contatos entre os participantes permitiram identificar o nível de envolvimento destes no curso. Esta pesquisa contribui com a gestão de conhecimento por evidenciar as redes sociais formadas pelos dados de comunicações e de interações do curso. O acesso às redes sociais de um curso a distância possibilita ao gestor acompanhar o nível de participação, as trocas de informações e a construção de conhecimento. Estas informações são úteis para as tomadas de decisões e podem colaborar para o desenvolvimento educacional.