Biography
Biography: Alfred Inselberg
Abstract
I want to be stunned by a visualization discovery … a WOW moment! And I do not mean that some variable values turned out to be much different than expected or the location of an event was different than expected, etc. But rather that something far-reaching we had no idea existed was found, something like … penicillin! This should be the measure of visualization’s success. And just how do we do that? For one thing luck helps but, as I tell my students, “When you work harder your luck … improves”! For a data-set with M items there are 2M possible subsets anyone of which may turn out to be the one satisfying our objectives. With our fantastic pattern-recognition ability we can cut great swaths through this combinatorial explosion discovering patterns corresponding to relational information from a good data display. This is something that simply cannot be automated … thank goodness! Patterns are geometrical creatures and so we need to learn geometry. Actually from our point-of-view we are not interested in rigid patterns but malleable ones e.g. “gaps” which can be different in shape but are gaps, nonetheless. That is we are really in the topology of the patterns. It has been shown that multidimensional patterns cannot be discovered directly from their points. Rather they can be synthesized from lower dimensional information. Even in 3-D, we learn to look at planes not by their points but by their planar surface/shape consisting of their lines and ditto for surfaces. We need to discuss and adopt a rigorous syllabus for the discipline of Visualization involving geometry, topology and cognition among others. This is our best investment for the future. Research on the geometry and topology induced by ||-coords has made great strides. Many patterns corresponding to multivariate relations have been discovered. We have embarked on a project to transform these results into powerful tools for our exploration and data mining arsenal. They revolutionize the power of modern ||-coords.