Data Visualization: From Digital Data to Visual Understanding and Knowledge Discovery

Presented by Christine Trinter & Chaoli Wang

Emerging from the 1990s, data visualization has quickly become an indispensable tool for us to comprehend the massive amount of digital data generated from every field of science and engineering as well as our daily lives. Data visualization is not just about generating images and videos, it is about interactive visual exploration where users take the driver's seat to gain understanding and knowledge about the underlying data through browsing, querying and reasoning. This seminar will present a grand tour of data visualization, from fundamental principles of visual encoding to core visualization techniques to an array of applications. The goal is to highlight the essential role that visualization plays in our increasingly connected digital world. 

About Christine Trinter & Chaoli Wang

Christine Trinter is an assistant professor of mathematics education with the Center for STEM Education at the University of Notre Dame where she teaches mathematics content and assessment courses in the Alliance for Catholic Education's, M. Ed. program and data visualization courses for the Notre Dame Education, Schooling, and Society minor. Dr. Trinter's research focuses on factors affecting teacher development, curriculum design, and technology usage in the mathematics classroom and she serves schools both nationally and internationally providing professional development in these areas.

Chaoli Wang is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches algorithms, computer graphics, and data visualization courses. Dr. Wang's main research interest is data visualization, in particular on the topics of time-varying multivariate data visualization, flow visualization, as well as information-theoretic algorithms, graph-based techniques, and deep learning solutions for data analytics. He has published 90+ refereed journal and conference papers and his papers have been cited more than 2,000 times. Dr. Wang also has a keen interest in computer science education and the educational software tool FlowVisual developed by his team  (https://sites.nd.edu/chaoli-wang/flowvisual/) has been downloaded nearly 1,500 times worldwide.