This award supports the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge Workshop 2009. This workshop is bringing together individuals who participate in the VAST 2009 Challenge Competition taking place from February 2009 to July 2009 to present their results and discuss their experiences.
Research on visual analytics is very timely, and it is clearly attracting a lot of interest in the research community. VAST 2009 is expected to contribute to the following goals: (1) focus the community on working on useful and realistic visual analytics problems, (2) compare and contrast systems developed or used by the participants, and (3) gather lessons learned from testing novel methodologies and metrics for evaluation.
The workshop will bring visual analytics developers and evaluators together for a full day to present the results of the Challenge, and discuss lessons learned about evaluation. It will expose many researchers -- in particular students -- to the challenges of evaluating complex systems for use by analysts. Papers summarizing the challenge and workshop results will be widely disseminated, including the VAST 2009 Website (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/VASTchallenge09/).
