Who: Alexander Lex (Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the School of Computing at the University of Utah)
When: August 7, 2015, 11:00am
Where: Währinger Straße 29, 1090 Wien, Hörsaal 3
Title: Enabling Scientific Discovery through Interactive Visual Data Analysis
Abstract:
Today, scientific discovery is increasingly data driven and requires computational support. However, there is an important class of problems for which purely automatic approaches do not suffice, since they require human reasoning and decision making and can benefit from contextual knowledge humans possess. In my talk I will show how to support this interplay between data, computation, visualization and humans.
I will give examples from molecular biology, specifically multivariate biological networks, but also introduce broadly applicable visual analysis methods for the analysis of set-based data.
For an overview of the techniques and tools refer to caleydo.org and vcg.github.io/upset/.
short bio:
Alexander Lex is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Before joining Utah he was a lecturer and a post-doctoral visualization researcher in Hanspeter Pfister's group at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his PhD from the Graz University of Technology in 2012. In 2011 he was a visiting researcher at the Computational Genomics Research Group at Harvard Medical School.
His primary research interests are data visualization, especially applied to molecular biology, and human computer interaction. He is one of the core developers and leaders of the Caleydo project, an open-source framework for the visualization of biological data. Alexander is the recipient of an Erwin Schroedinger Fellowship, granted by the Austrian Science Fund, and has won numerous awards, including multiple best paper awards or honorable mentions at visualization conferences and a best dissertation award from his alma mater.