Slides from the VIS in practice panel "Increasing the Impact of Visualization Research" during IEEE VIS 2017 in Phoenix, AZ. http://www.visinpractice.rwth-aachen.de/panel.html

1. Krist Wongsuphasawat / @kristw
INCREASING
THE IMPACT OF
VISUALIZATION
RESEARCH

2. Krist Wongsuphasawat / @kristw
Computer Engineer
Bangkok, Thailand
PhD in Computer Science
Information Visualization
Univ. of Maryland

3. Krist Wongsuphasawat / @kristw
Computer Engineer
Bangkok, Thailand
IBM
Microsoft
PhD in Computer Science
Information Visualization
Univ. of Maryland

4. PhD in Computer Science
Information Visualization
Univ. of Maryland
IBM
Microsoft
Data Visualization Scientist
Twitter
Krist Wongsuphasawat / @kristw
Computer Engineer
Bangkok, Thailand

5. WHAT I DO AT WORK
Internal data tools
from dashboards to custom vis tools

6. CUSTOM VIS

7. BAR CHARTS

8. WHAT I DO AT WORK
Internal data tools
from dashboards to custom vis tools
Public-facing visualization (interactive.twitter.com)
Some taste of data journalism -style of work

9. interactive.twitter.com/winter-is-here

10. WHAT I DO AT WORK
Internal data tools
from dashboards to custom vis tools
Public-facing visualization (interactive.twitter.com)
Some taste of data journalism -style of work
Teach internal classes and provide consultation.
Open-source
labella.js, d3kit
*Not research

11. ACADEMIA VS. INDUSTRY

12. ACADEMIA VS. INDUSTRY
Academic Research Industry
Target Extend human knowledge Business. Low hanging fruits.
Problem More specific Simpler
Scope Isolate problem Some edge cases can’t be avoided.
Solution Novel, more elegant Duct-taped is fine. Reuse is fine.
Lifespan Build, publish, done Build, maintain, improve
Deadline Publication Depends on project

13. by Elijah Meeks (980 participants)
DATA VISUALIZATION JOB SURVEY

14. PRIORITY OF DATA VIS IN YOUR WORK
Primary focus
Secondary focus
Lower priority
0 80 160 240 320 400

15. TOP CHART TYPES IN PRODUCTION
(used in production in the last 6 months)

16. HOW IS YOUR ORG. USING VIS?

17. HOW DO YOU PRESENT YOUR VIS?

18. WHAT TOOLS DO YOU USE?

19. WHO YOU LOOK TO AS A THOUGHT LEADER IN VIS?

20. 23 practitioners who have used research in their work
IMPACT OF RESEARCH

21. WHAT DO YOU DO AT WORK?

22. HOW IMPORTANT ARE THESE FACTORS IN MAKING YOU
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT A RESEARCH?

23. HOW DO YOU FIND/DISCOVER PAPERS?

24. TYPE OF PAPERS YOU FIND USEFUL?

25. HOW RESEARCH INFLUENCE YOUR WORK?

26. PAPERS USED RECENTLY
Colorgorical: creating discriminable and preferable color palettes for
information visualization
"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier
Group-in-a-Box Layout for Multi-faceted Analysis of Communities
Visualizing Multi-Attribute Time-Series Data Using a Thermal Metaphor
Visualization of Large Hierarchical Data by Circle Packing

27. REASONS THAT LIMIT THE IMPACT

28. WHAT LEADS TO SUCCESSFUL ADOPTION?

29. MESSAGE TO YOUNG RESEARCHERS
“Find an industry and focus on foundational problems there.”
“Don't be disheartened by the fact that everyone uses spreadsheets!”
“Start with an interesting topic or difficult dataset.
Too many visualization research papers tackle small-minded or irrelevant projects.”
“work with real data set, and not just artificial ones.”
“Publish openly -- practitioners don't subscribe to academic journals”
“Make your end results reusable and comparable”
“Write up a thoughtful evaluation that helps practitioners clearly understand both the advantages and
disadvantages of your technique, as well as which use cases and datasets benefit the most from your
technique.”
“Implement ideas as easily usable packages
instead of creating full blown web applications with many requirements to run.”

30. REACHING PRACTITIONERS
Find relevant problems
More frequent use, more impact.
Get their attention
Make paper available. Not everybody subscribes to IEEE.
Online demo, social media, blog posts
Clarify advantages.
Reduce effort to take your research to production
Open source
Documentation and examples.
Fit in the ecosystems: D3, R, javascript
Try to understand the things going on in industry as well
long term vs. short term
Krist Wongsuphasawat / @kristw
Memosaur

31. Adam Pearce, Yang Wang, Robert Gove, Javid, Adam Krebs, Luis Carli, Robert Harris, Juan Morales, James
Saunders, Awalin, Gail, Pragyan and other anonymous participants
Charts are made with vega-lite.
and my wife for taking care of our very active baby
while I am away to this conference.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

32. RESOURCES
Golden Gate bridge https://goo.gl/ogCzxM
Meteor Shower https://goo.gl/h8ZpXM
T-Rex https://goo.gl/DeqxJV
Typing on Keyboard by Glenn Carstens via Unsplash
Watercolor Map by Stamen Design

33. THANK YOU