Keynote of EuroVA 2015

Professor Georges Grinstein

ED Director – Institute for Visualization and Perception Research
Director – Center for Biomolecular and Medical Informatics
University of Massachusetts Lowell

“Disruptive Grand Challenges for Visual Analytics”

Scientific Data Visualization, Information Visualization and Visual Analytics share the same pipeline aimed at human consumption: taking data, analyzing that data, producing visual representations on various interactive media. There are some minor differences but all in all they’re quite similar.

All three have very analogous Grand Challenges (scalability, developing a theory, computing the best presentation, …).  I’ve spoken on such and other grand challenges in each of these areas over the last 30 years, identifying what wicked problems really need to be addressed, which key problems would have tremendous impact, and, of course, I am ready to do so again. But progress on these has been quite slow and technology is moving so much more rapidly than anticipated. I had hoped that my lectures in the last few years on opportunistic challenges, challenges that would have incredible more immediate effect on the next decade, would awaken more activity in defining new and radical approaches, and some have, but not enough.

And so in this brief talk I will discuss new grand challenges that represent disruptive technology opportunities. I will place the earlier grand challenges in context with my proposed disruptive ones and even suggest some necessary steps.