VLHCC 2012

Call For Papers – VL/HCC 2012

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
September 30 – October 4, 2012
Innsbruck, Austria, co-located with MODELS’12
http://vlhcc.org/

From the beginning of the computer age, people have sought easier ways
to learn, express, and understand computational ideas. Whether this
meant moving from punch cards to textual languages, or command lines
to graphical UIs, the quest to make computation easier to express,
manipulate, and understand by a broader group of people is an ongoing
challenge. The IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric
Computing (VL/HCC) is the premier international forum for research on
this topic. Established in 1984, the mission of the conference is to
support the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing
technologies and languages for programming, modeling, and
communicating, which are easier to learn, use, and understand by
people.

Important Dates

• Abstract submissions: 9 March 2012
• Paper submissions: 16 March 2012
• Notification of reviews: 25 May 2012
• Rebuttals due: 29 May 2012
• Notification of final decision: 6 June 2012
• Camera-ready copies due: 29 June 2012

Scope and Topics

We solicit original, unpublished research papers that focus on efforts
to design, formalize, implement, and evaluate computing languages and
development tools that are easier to learn, easier to use, and easier
to understand. This includes languages and tools expressed not only as
text, but through any other means (visual, sketch-based, gesture-based,
or otherwise). This also includes languages and tools intended for a
wide range of audiences, including professional software developers,
novice programmers, or any other people who find a need to
express computational ideas. We also seek papers that address
cognitive, social, cultural, and theoretical aspects of efforts to
lower barriers to computing.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Design, evaluation, and theory of visual languages
• End-user development, end-user programming
• Novel user interfaces for expressing computation
• Human aspects of software development
• Debugging and program understanding
• Computer science education
• Software development tools
• Model-driven development
• Domain-specific languages
• Software visualization
• Query languages

Paper Submissions

We invite two kinds of papers, due March 16, 2012:

• full-length research papers, up to 8 pages
• short research papers, up to 4 pages

All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete
archival contributions. The contribution from full papers are more
extensive than those from short papers. Preliminary research should be
submitted to the Posters category. All submissions will be reviewed
by members of the Program Committee.

Accepted papers will be distributed at the conference and will
appear in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. In 2011 the conference paper
format was changed by IEEE, so be sure you are using the new format,
which is available at:
http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Moreover, authors of the best papers accepted for the conference will be
invited to submit revised versions for a special issue of the Journal of
Visual Languages and Computing.

The Secret Life of Bugs

A paper by Jorge Aranda and Gina Venolia entitled The Secret Life of Bugs: Going Past the Errors and Omissions in Software Repositories, (ACM Link) presented at ICSE 2009 presents a field study they conducted with Microsoft Developers and how they coordinate to resolve bugs from software repositories. What would be interesting is to see this study replicated on distributed open source software and software developed by smaller organizations to see what the similarities there are.

One of the implications of this paper for SoftVis researchers is to think about how we can develop tools to support some of the social and online communications to integrate with the visualizations of our tools.

Abstract

Every bug has a story behind it. The people that discover and resolve it need to coordinate, to get information from documents, tools, or other people, and to navigate through issues of accountability, ownership, and organizational structure. This paper reports on a field study of coordination activities around bug fixing that used a combination of case study research and a survey of software professionals. Results show that the histories of even simple bugs are strongly dependent on social, organizational, and technical knowledge that cannot be solely extracted through automation of electronic repositories, and that such automation provides incomplete and often erroneous accounts of coordination. The paper uses rich bug histories and survey results to identify common bug fixing coordination patterns and to provide implications for tool designers and researchers of coordination in software development.

Collaborative Visualization: Definition, Challenges and Research Agenda

As software systems become increasingly larger and developed by teams of software developers it is important for software visualization researchers to help support software developers collaborate better with tools, techniques, and environments.

A paper entitled Collaborative Visualization: Definition, Challenges and Research Agenda by Petra Isenberg, Niklas Elmqvist, Jean Scholtz, Daniel Cernea, Kwan-Liu, Hans Hagen in Information Visualization Journal, October 2011 sheds some light about a sub-area of CSCW and Information Visualization called Collaborative Visualization which is of relevance to the SoftVis community.

• http://ivi.sagepub.com/content/10/4/310 (IV Journal)
• http://www.aviz.fr/~isenberg/publications/papers/Isenberg_2011_CVD.pdf (Pre-print)

Abstract

The conflux of two growing areas of technology – collaboration and visualization – into a new research direction, collaborative visualization, provides new research challenges. Technology now allows us to easily connect and collaborate with one another – in settings as diverse as over networked computers, across mobile devices, or using shared displays such as interactive walls and tabletop surfaces. Digital information is now regularly accessed by multiple people in order to share information, to view it together, to analyze it, or to form decisions. Visualizations are used to deal more effectively with large amounts of information while interactive visualizations allow users to explore the underlying data. While researchers face many challenges in collaboration and in visualization, the emergence of collaborative visualization poses additional challenges, but it is also an exciting opportunity to reach new audiences and applications for visualization tools and techniques.

The purpose of this article is (1) to provide a definition, clear scope, and overview of the evolving field of collaborative visualization, (2) to help pinpoint the unique focus of collaborative visualization with its specific aspects, challenges, and requirements within the intersection of general computer-supported cooperative work and visualization research, and (3) to draw attention to important future research questions to be addressed by the community. We conclude by discussing a research agenda for future work on collaborative visualization and urge for a new generation of visualization tools that are designed with collaboration in mind from their very inception.

Definition::

Collaborative visualization is the shared use of computer-supported, (interactive) visual representations of data by more than one person with the common goal of contribution to joint information processing activities.

Collaborative Visualization Scenarios:

Collaborative visualization can occur in many scenarios delineated according to space and time. See the following image taken from the paper.

Challenges:

The following are the challenges to address in the research space intersecting collaborative work and visualization:

Aspect	Collaborative Visualization Challenge
Users	Multiple Participants, domain specific e.g. multiple software developers
Tasks	Collaborative activity centric e.g. pair software analysis
Cognition	Collaborative foraging and collaborative sensemaking e.g. mining software for increased understanding
Results	Consensus, shared insight e.g. what parts of a system need refactoring
Interaction	Multiple inputs e.g. how to design systems to avoid interaction conflicts
Visual Representations	Multiple displays, novel display, and input technology e.g. different views of a software system like structure and evolution
Evaluation	Social interaction e.g. how to evaluate the possible additional insights or the group learning effect that can be achieved using such a system

Research Agenda

One of the main goals of research in collaborative visualization is to enable people to collaboratively use visual representations of data to gain additional understanding, knowledge, and insight into the data – different or more encompassing – than would have been possible had they explored the data individually. To learn more about how this goal can be reached, researchers have to address both the technical challenges of designing and implementing digital and physical environments that support collaborative data analysis, as well as the social aspects of group work.

Goals for collaborative visualization research:

• More dedicated research on the challenges listed above e.g. interaction with visualization systems – particularly focusing on collaborative interactions and data exchanges
• Engage new audiences e.g. software developers
• Standardize collaboration support e.g. develop software visualization toolkits instead of techniques and plugins
• Expand to new collaborative spaces e.g. distributed or co-located software development
• Develop dedicated evaluation methods e.g. specific methods for evaluating software visualization systems
• Integration and adoption e.g. getting more industry people to use software visualization tools
• Derive a higher level understanding e.g. map out a better understanding of collaborative software analysis as a process and do empirical studies on developers comprehending software

Collaborative Software Visualization

Some researchers in the SoftVis community have begun working in this Collaborative Software Visualization sub-area, with some links to their papers:

• Craig Anslow, Stuart Marshall, James Noble, and Robert Biddle. Interactive Multi-touch Surfaces for Software Visualization. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces (DEXIS) at the Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS), 2011.
• Sandro Boccuzzo, Harald C. Gall. Multi-Touch Collaboration for Software Exploration. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) 2010.
• Niko Myller. Collaborative Software Visualization for Learning: Theory and Applications.. PhD Thesis. University of Eastern Finland. 2009.
• Margaret-Anne Storey, Chris Bennett, R. Ian Bull, Daniel German. Remixing Visualization to Support Collaboration in Software Maintenance. Frontiers of Software Maintenance at the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), 2008.

An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages

An interesting paper entitled An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages by Andreas Stefik, Susanna Siebert, Melissa Stefik, Kim Slattery was presented at a workshop I co-organised PLATEAU 2011.

We present here an empirical study comparing the accuracy rates of novices writing software in three programming languages: Quorum, Perl, and Randomo. The first language, Quorum, we call an evidence-based programming language, where the syntax, semantics, and API designs change in correspondence to the latest academic research and literature on programming language usability. Second, while Perl is well known, we call Randomo a Placebo-language, where some of the syntax was chosen with a random number generator and the ASCII table. We compared novices that were programming for the first time using each of these languages, testing how accurately they could write simple programs using common program constructs (e.g., loops, conditionals, functions, variables, parameters). Results showed that while Quorum users were afforded significantly greater accuracy compared to those using Perl and Randomo, Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.

There has been some interesting discussion of this paper elsewhere too:

• http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/10/27/213231/is-perl-better-than-a-randomly-generated-programming-language?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
• http://www.neverworkintheory.org/?p=197
• http://www.neverworkintheory.org/?p=211
• http://tavisharmstrong.com/2011/12/04/thoughts-on-the-quorum-paper/
• http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4391
• http://www.i-programmer.info/programming/perl/3331-perl-not-suitable-for-beginners.html
• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3152147
• http://www.allhatter.com/archive/index.php/t-63205.html

Workshop on Social Media Visualization (SocMedVis)

Call for Papers

Workshop on Social Media Visualization (SocMedVis)
at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’12)

4th June 2012, Dublin, Ireland

http://socmedvis.ucd.ie

Social media study and analysis brings researchers from many fields into a single setting. Even though the tasks of these researchers are varied, data visualization and analytics plays an important role. For industry and academics alike, visualization of social media data helps with hypothesis formation and supports the explanation of phenomena.

The Workshop on Social Media Visualization (SocMedVis) will be held in conjunction with the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’12) in Dublin on 4th June 2012. The workshop is a venue for presentation of research and applications of visualization of social media data.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and industry practitioners interested in visual and interactive techniques for social media analysis to discuss their potential application to the social sciences, humanities, and industry. We solicit contributions that discuss novel techniques and applications of visualization and visual analytics approaches to social media data sources.

Important Dates

• Paper Submission Deadline: 2nd March 2012
• Notification: 16th March 2012
• Paper Camera-Ready Deadline: 2nd April 2012
• Early registration for ICWSM’12: 6th April 2012
• Workshop: 4th June 2012

Topics

We invite research, application, and position papers on the topic of
visualization and social media. Topics of interest include but are not
limited to:

• Visual Analysis of Evolving Social Media Data
• Interactive Techniques for Sentiment Analysis and Brand Perception
• Visualization of Memes and Trends in Social Media
• Visualization of Social Media for Media Studies
• Social Media in Social Sciences and Humanities
• Data Mining and Machine Learning in Social Media
• Visual Analytics of Social Media in Industry
• Formal Evaluation Techniques in Social Media
• Systems and Languages for Social Media Analytics
• Methodologies and Processes for Social Media Analysis
• Collaborative Analysis of Text Corpora
• Real-Time Visualization of Social Media Data
• Visualization and Visual Text Analytics in Social Media
• Visualization and Visual Analytics of Social Media Networks
• Studies of Analytic Work on Social Media
• Representations of Uncertainty in Text Analytics

Submissions

Papers are limited to 4 pages in length and should have a visualization or visual analytics component to them. Papers must be formatted according to AAAI guidelines. Papers in PDF format must be submitted using EasyChair by 2nd March 2012. A subset of the accepted papers will be invited for oral presentation at the workshop. All other accepted papers will be presented as posters during the poster session or interactive demo session.

The program will also include a madness session at the beginning of the workshop to allow anyone attending the workshop to briefly introduce themselves, their work, and state their positions and goals related to the scope of the workshop. If you are planning to attend the workshop you are welcome to send an email to conference organizers to ensure a slot in the madness session by 2nd April 2012.

We also plan to host a panel of researchers in social sciences and humanities and industrial researchers of varied perspectives on the application of visualization to academic disciplines and industry where visualization is needed to understand social media data.

For more information please visit the workshop web page at
http://socmedvis.ucd.ie or email socmedvis@ucd.ie.

Organisers

• Daniel Archambault, University College Dublin, daniel.archambault@ucd.ie
• Eser Kandogan, IBM Research, eser@us.ibm.com
• Martin Harrigan, University College Dublin, martin.harrigan@ucd.ie