LADV: Deep Learning Assisted Authoring of Dashboard Visualizations From Images and Sketches.

Dashboard visualizations are widely used in data-intensive applications such as business intelligence, operation monitoring, and urban planning. However, existing visualization authoring tools are inefficient in the rapid prototyping of dashboards because visualization expertise and user intention need to be integrated. We propose a novel approach to rapid conceptualization that can construct dashboard templates from exemplars to mitigate the burden of designing, implementing, and evaluating dashboard visualizations. The kernel of our approach is a novel deep learning-based model that can identify and locate charts of various categories and extract colors from an input image or sketch. We design and implement a web-based authoring tool for learning, composing, and customizing dashboard visualizations in a cloud computing environment. Examples, user studies, and user feedback from real scenarios in Alibaba Cloud verify the usability and efficiency of the proposed approach.

VAUD: A Visual Analysis Approach for Exploring Spatio-Temporal Urban Data.

Urban data is massive, heterogeneous, and spatio-temporal, posing a substantial challenge for visualization and analysis. In this paper, we design and implement a novel visual analytics approach, Visual Analyzer for Urban Data (VAUD), that supports the visualization, querying, and exploration of urban data. Our approach allows for cross-domain correlation from multiple data sources by leveraging spatial-temporal and social inter-connectedness features. Through our approach, the analyst is able to select, filter, aggregate across multiple data sources and extract information that would be hidden to a single data subset. To illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we provide case studies on a real urban dataset that contains the cyber-, physical-, and social- information of 14 million citizens over 22 days.

A Utility-Aware Visual Approach for Anonymizing Multi-Attribute Tabular Data.

Sharing data for public usage requires sanitization to prevent sensitive information from leaking. Previous studies have presented methods for creating privacy preserving visualizations. However, few of them provide sufficient feedback to users on how much utility is reduced (or preserved) during such a process. To address this, we design a visual interface along with a data manipulation pipeline that allows users to gauge utility loss while interactively and iteratively handling privacy issues in their data. Widely known and discussed types of privacy models, i.e., syntactic anonymity and differential privacy, are integrated and compared under different use case scenarios. Case study results on a variety of examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

GraphProtector: A Visual Interface for Employing and Assessing Multiple Privacy Preserving Graph Algorithms.

Analyzing social networks reveals the relationships between individuals and groups in the data. However, such analysis can also lead to privacy exposure (whether intentionally or inadvertently): leaking the real-world identity of ostensibly anonymous individuals. Most sanitization strategies modify the graph's structure based on hypothesized tactics that an adversary would employ. While combining multiple anonymization schemes provides a more comprehensive privacy protection, deciding the appropriate set of techniques-along with evaluating how applying the strategies will affect the utility of the anonymized results-remains a significant challenge. To address this problem, we introduce GraphProtector, a visual interface that guides a user through a privacy preservation pipeline. GraphProtector enables multiple privacy protection schemes which can be simultaneously combined together as a hybrid approach. To demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphProtector, we report several case studies and feedback collected from interviews with expert users in various scenarios.