1st Workshop on Data Systems for Interactive Analysis

This is the website for the First Workshop on Data Systems for Interactive Analysis, to be held in conjunction with IEEE VIS 2015 in Chicago, October 26th, at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago.

The goal of this workshop is to foster innovative research at the intersection of databases, machine learning, and interactive visualization.

Database researchers have developed techniques for storing and querying massive amounts of data, including methods for distributed, streaming and approximate computation. Machine learning techniques provide ways to discover unexpected patterns and to automate and scale well-defined analysis procedures. Recent systems research has looked at how to develop novel database systems architectures to support the iterative, optimization-oriented workloads of machine learning algorithms.

Of course, both the inputs and outputs of these systems are ultimately driven by people, in support of analysis tasks. The life-cycle of data involves an iterative, interactive process of determining which questions to ask, the data to analyze, appropriate features and models, and interpreting results. In order to achieve better analysis outcomes, data processing systems require improved interfaces that account for the strengths and limitations of human perception and cognition. Meanwhile, to keep up with the rising tide of data, interactive visualization tools need to integrate more techniques from databases and machine learning.

In this workshop, we will explore the idea that the next generation of database, machine learning, and interactive visualization systems should not be designed in isolation. For example, machine learning techniques might recommend improved data transformation and visual encoding decisions. Or, database query optimizers might take advantage of perceptual constraints, while prefetching methods reduce latency by modeling likely interactions.

This workshop seeks to jump start cross-pollination between these fields. The program will be split between invited talks from researchers in these communities, and speculative, ongoing work that straddles the areas.

Program

Invited Speaker: Joe Hellerstein

We are very excited to announce that Joe Hellerstein from UC Berkeley will be the keynote speaker for the workshop.

Talk: People, data, computation: an evolving trifecta

When working on human interaction with data, a recurring theme is the need to simultaneously address issues in HCI, database systems, and statistical methods. Ironically, these complexities are rooted in the goal of providing increased simplicity and power for users. I’ll reflect briefly on my own experience with these issues in topics like online aggregation and data wrangling, and consider the nature of this complexity as we negotiate the evolving dialog between people, data and computation.

Joseph M. Hellerstein is the Jim Gray Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and the recipient of three ACM-SIGMOD “Test of Time” awards for his research. In 2010, Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology, and MIT’s Technology Review magazine included his work on their TR10 list of the 10 technologies “most likely to change our world”. Hellerstein is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Trifacta, a software vendor providing intelligent interactive solutions to the messy problem of wrangling data. He serves on the technical advisory boards of a number of computing and Internet companies including EMC, SurveyMonkey, Captricity, and Dato, and previously served as the Director of Intel Research, Berkeley.

Topics

This workshop will focus on interactive systems: techniques, methods, architecture, systems that enable the user to interactively explore and analyze large amounts of data in the back end with little or no latency. We encourage late-breaking work, research in progress, and position papers in interactive analysis, broadly construed. For example, topics of interest to the workshop include (but are not limited to):

  • design of database architectures for interactive analysis
  • novel database applications for interactive analysis
  • novel database techniques based on perceptual constraints and human-centered design
  • evaluation of database systems for interactive analysis
  • identify unique characteristics of databases for supporting visualization
  • communication protocols between front and back ends
  • techniques for data storage, retrieval, compression, transformation, sampling, and streaming
  • techniques for metadata generation
  • front-end architectures that exploit these novel back-end capabilities

We are interested, more generally, in the questions that arise at the intersection of these systems.

Important Dates (Updated!)

  • Submission Deadline: 2015-07-31 2015-08-17
  • Notifications: 2015-08-15 2015-08-31
  • Final versions due: 2015-08-30 2015-09-15
  • Event: 2015-10-26, Monday, 2-6PM

Paper format and submission

Submissions should follow IEEE TVCG guidelines, which can be found here. Submissions should not exceed five total pages, the last page of which should contain only references.

Submission

Registration

At least one author from an accepted paper will be required to attend the workshop. Registration for the workshop can be done via VIS 2015.

Organizers