Hello all, Please join us for a student roundtable with Professor Sheelagh Carpendale on Tuesday March 14th, 3:45-4:45 PM at BA5187. Professor Carpendale is visiting us from the University of Calgary. Her research spans information visualization, visual analytics, and human-computer interaction, drawing upon her combined background of computer science and visual arts. This will be an excellent opportunity for students interested in related areas to meet with a leading expert in the community. You can access BA5187 through BA5166 (DGP lab on the 5th floor of Bahen Center). See the forwarded talk summary below for a more detailed biography and research interest of Prof. Carpendale.   Cheers, Jiannan Li   On 2017-03-13, 10:08 AM, "Steve Easterbrook" sme@cs.toronto.edu wrote:       Invited research seminar hosted jointly by the departments of Computer Science & Statistical Sciences          "Information Visualization: making data comprehensible"          Sheelagh Carpendale, University of Calgary          Monday, March 13, 2017, at 12:00 PM     Bahen Centre, 40 St. George Street, Rm. 1200          Abstract:          Modern society demands that people manage, communicate, and interact with digital information at an ever-increasing pace. While we all want to be informed, we do not want to experience this information as stress. It is not the information itself that is the problem, but the manner in which we are bombarded with information in forms that are often hard to interpret. One question is – how can we visualize information in a manner aids comprehension, and provokes interpretation, exploration and appreciation. This is a non-trivial challenge. How do we provide spatial representations of non-spatial data that are not only true to the data but help reveal patterns and characteristics of intrinsically non-spatial data such as text and tables of numbers? I will discuss these questions in context of my on-going research, noting how I have both influenced and been influenced by the emerging and changing trends and challenges in information visualization research.          Biography:          Sheelagh Carpendale is a professor at the University of Calgary where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Information Visualization and the NSERC/AITF/SMART Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies. She has received many awards including the E.W.R. NSERC STEACIE Memorial Fellowship; a BAFTA (British Academy of Film & Television Arts Interactive Awards); an ASTech Innovations in Technology Award; and the CHCCS Achievement Award. She leads the Innovations in Visualization (InnoVis) research group and initiated interdisciplinary graduate programs in Computational Media Design. Her research draws upon her combined backgrounds in computer science and visual arts, benefiting from the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization to enable the design of innovative, people-centred information technologies. By studying how people interact with information both in work and social practices, she works towards designing more natural, accessible and understandable interactive visual representations of data. She combines information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction with innovative new interaction techniques to better support the everyday practices of people who are viewing, representing, and interacting with information.