An ongoing debate in the Visualization community concerns the role that visualization types play in data understanding. In human cognition, understanding and memorability are intertwined. As a first step towards being able to ask questions about impact and effectiveness, here we ask: 'What makes a visualization memorable?' We ran the largest scale visualization study to date using 2,070 single-panel visualizations, categorized with visualization type (e.g., bar chart, line graph, etc.), collected from news media sites, government reports, scientific journals, and infographic sources. Each visualization was annotated with additional attributes, including ratings for data-ink ratios and visual densities. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, we collected memorability scores for hundreds of these visualizations, and discovered that observers are consistent in which visualizations they find memorable and forgettable. We find intuitive results (e.g., attributes like color and the inclusion of a human recognizable object enhance memorability) and less intuitive results (e.g., common graphs are less memorable than unique visualization types). Altogether our findings suggest that quantifying memorability is a general metric of the utility of information, an essential step towards determining how to design effective visualizations.

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What Makes a Visualization Memorable

Information visualization (InfoVis), the study of transforming data, information, and knowledge into interactive visual representations, is very important to users because it provides mental models of information. The boom in big data analytics has triggered broad use of InfoVis in a variety of domains, ranging from finance to sports to politics. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and key insights into this fast-rising area. The research on InfoVis is organized into a taxonomy that contains four main categories, namely empirical methodologies, user interactions, visualization frameworks, and applications, which are each described in terms of their major goals, fundamental principles, recent trends, and state-of-the-art approaches. At the conclusion of this survey, we identify existing technical challenges and propose directions for future research.

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A survey on information visualization: recent advances and challenges

This state of the art report focuses on glyph-based visualization, a common form of visual design where a data set is depicted by a collection of visual objects referred to as glyphs. Its major strength is that patterns of multivariate data involving more than two attribute dimensions can often be more readily perceived in the context of a spatial relationship, whereas many techniques for spatial data such as direct volume rendering find difficult to depict with multivariate or multi-field data, and many techniques for non-spatial data such as parallel coordinates are less able to convey spatial relationships encoded in the data. This report fills several major gaps in the literature, drawing the link between the fundamental concepts in semiotics and the broad spectrum of glyph-based visualization, reviewing existing design guidelines and implementation techniques, and surveying the use of glyph-based visualization in many applications.

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Glyph-based Visualization: Foundations, Design Guidelines, Techniques and Applications

In this paper we move beyond memorability and investigate how visualizations are recognized and recalled. For this study we labeled a dataset of 393 visualizations and analyzed the eye movements of 33 participants as well as thousands of participant-generated text descriptions of the visualizations. This allowed us to determine what components of a visualization attract people's attention, and what information is encoded into memory. Our findings quantitatively support many conventional qualitative design guidelines, including that (1) titles and supporting text should convey the message of a visualization, (2) if used appropriately, pictograms do not interfere with understanding and can improve recognition, and (3) redundancy helps effectively communicate the message. Importantly, we show that visualizations memorable “at-a-glance” are also capable of effectively conveying the message of the visualization. Thus, a memorable visualization is often also an effective one.

Beyond Memorability: Visualization Recognition and Recall

Web caching and prefetching are the most popular techniques that play a key role in improving the Web performance by keeping web objects that are likely to be visited in the near future closer to the client. Web caching can work independently or integrated with the web prefetching. The Web caching and prefetching can complement each other since the web caching exploits the temporal locality for predicting revisiting requested objects, while the web prefetching utilizes the spatial locality for predicting next related web objects of the requested Web objects. This paper reviews principles and some existing web caching and prefetching approaches. The conventional and intelligent web caching techniques are investigated and discussed. Moreover, Web prefetching techniques are summarized and classified with comparison limitations of these approaches. This paper also presents and discusses some studies that take into consideration impact of integrating both web caching and web prefetching together.

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A Survey of Web Caching and Prefetching

In written and spoken communications, figures of speech (e.g., metaphors and synecdoche) are often used as an aid to help convey abstract or less tangible concepts. However, the benefits of using rhetorical illustrations or embellishments in visualization have so far been inconclusive. In this work, we report an empirical study to evaluate hypotheses that visual embellishments may aid memorization, visual search and concept comprehension. One major departure from related experiments in the literature is that we make use of a dual-task methodology in our experiment. This design offers an abstraction of typical situations where viewers do not have their full attention focused on visualization (e.g., in meetings and lectures). The secondary task introduces “divided attention”, and makes the effects of visual embellishments more observable. In addition, it also serves as additional masking in memory-based trials. The results of this study show that visual embellishments can help participants better remember the information depicted in visualization. On the other hand, visual embellishments can have a negative impact on the speed of visual search. The results show a complex pattern as to the benefits of visual embellishments in helping participants grasp key concepts from visualization.

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An Empirical Study on Using Visual Embellishments in Visualization

This book chapter aims to discuss the 3D ultrasound reconstruction and visualization. First, the various types of 3D ultrasound system are reviewed, such as mechanical, 2D array, position tracking-based freehand, and untrackedbased freehand. Second, the 3D ultrasound reconstruction technique or pipeline used by the current existing system, which includes the data acquisition, data preprocessing, reconstruction method and 3D visualization, is discussed. The reconstruction method and 3D visualization will be emphasized. The reconstruction method includes the pixel-based method, volume-based method, and function-based method, accompanied with their benefits and drawbacks. In the 3D visualization, methods such as multiplanar reformatting, volume rendering, and surface rendering are presented. Lastly, its application in the medical field is reviewed as well.

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A Survey on 3D Ultrasound Reconstruction Techniques

Interactive Hand and Arm Gesture Control for 2D Medical Image and 3D Volumetric Medical Visualization

Intelligent web caching architecture

Coloring activity with pens and paper is a natural activity and an important experience for children to practice and express their creative skills. To gain interest and attention of kids making these creative activities are the main challenge faced by teachers and parents. By developing augmented reality coloring to solve this problem require us to design a mobile application with suitable coloring book contents designed suit for kids. This work aims to provide guidelines developing interactive coloring book with augmented reality for kids that integrate with our previous technique. Wonderful Augmented Reality and Arts (wARna) is our previous fast texturing technique as the main core of the framework application that interactively play colored 2D coloring book page by visualizing it in 3D on a user's view of the real world. This work proposed a framework with suitable specification in creation of content so it reusable to create new coloring content that integrated with a mobile application and highlighting issues that need to be solved.

Farhan Mohamed

Papers

An Empirical Study on Using Visual Embellishments in Visualization

A Survey on 3D Ultrasound Reconstruction Techniques

Interactive Hand and Arm Gesture Control for 2D Medical Image and 3D Volumetric Medical Visualization

Intelligent web caching architecture

Development of Mobile-Based Augmented Reality Colouring for Preschool Learning