SNIL: Generating Sports News From Insights With Large Language Models.

To enhance the appeal and informativeness of data news, there is an increasing reliance on data analysis techniques and visualizations, which poses a high demand for journalists' abilities. While numerous visual analytics systems have been developed for deriving insights, few tools specifically support and disseminate viewpoints for journalism. Thus, this work aims to facilitate the automatic creation of sports news from natural language insights. To achieve this, we conducted an extensive preliminary study on the published sports articles. Based on our findings, we propose a workflow - 1) exploring the data space behind insights, 2) generating narrative structures, 3) progressively generating each episode, and 4) mapping data spaces into communicative visualizations. We have implemented a human-AI interaction system called SNIL, which incorporates user input in conjunction with large language models (LLMs). It supports the modification of textual and graphical content within the episode-based structure by adjusting the description. We conduct user studies to demonstrate the usability of SNIL and the benefit of bridging the gap between analysis tasks and communicative tasks through expert and fan feedback.

ChartGPT: Leveraging LLMs to Generate Charts from Abstract Natural Language.

The use of natural language interfaces (NLIs) to create charts is becoming increasingly popular due to the intuitiveness of natural language interactions. One key challenge in this approach is to accurately capture user intents and transform them to proper chart specifications. This obstructs the wide use of NLI in chart generation, as users' natural language inputs are generally abstract (i.e., ambiguous or under-specified), without a clear specification of visual encodings. Recently, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have exhibited superior performance in understanding and generating natural language, demonstrating great potential for downstream tasks. Inspired by this major trend, we propose ChartGPT, generating charts from abstract natural language inputs. However, LLMs are struggling to address complex logic problems. To enable the model to accurately specify the complex parameters and perform operations in chart generation, we decompose the generation process into a step-by-step reasoning pipeline, so that the model only needs to reason a single and specific sub-task during each run. Moreover, LLMs are pre-trained on general datasets, which might be biased for the task of chart generation. To provide adequate visualization knowledge, we create a dataset consisting of abstract utterances and charts and improve model performance through fine-tuning. We further design an interactive interface for ChartGPT that allows users to check and modify the intermediate outputs of each step. The effectiveness of the proposed system is evaluated through quantitative evaluations and a user study.

Visualizing Large-Scale Spatial Time Series with GeoChron.

In geo-related fields such as urban informatics, atmospheric science, and geography, large-scale spatial time (ST) series (i.e., geo-referred time series) are collected for monitoring and understanding important spatiotemporal phenomena. ST series visualization is an effective means of understanding the data and reviewing spatiotemporal phenomena, which is a prerequisite for in-depth data analysis. However, visualizing these series is challenging due to their large scales, inherent dynamics, and spatiotemporal nature. In this study, we introduce the notion of patterns of evolution in ST series. Each evolution pattern is characterized by 1) a set of ST series that are close in space and 2) a time period when the trends of these ST series are correlated. We then leverage Storyline techniques by considering an analogy between evolution patterns and sessions, and finally design a novel visualization called GeoChron, which is capable of visualizing large-scale ST series in an evolution pattern-aware and narrative-preserving manner. GeoChron includes a mining framework to extract evolution patterns and two-level visualizations to enhance its visual scalability. We evaluate GeoChron with two case studies, an informal user study, an ablation study, parameter analysis, and running time analysis.

Grand Challenges in Visual Analytics Applications.

In the past two decades, research in visual analytics (VA) applications has made tremendous progress, not just in terms of scientific contributions, but also in real-world impact across wide-ranging domains including bioinformatics, urban analytics, and explainable AI. Despite these success stories, questions on the rigor and value of VA application research have emerged as a grand challenge. This article outlines a research and development agenda for making VA application research more rigorous and impactful. We first analyze the characteristics of VA application research and explain how they cause the rigor and value problem. Next, we propose a research ecosystem for improving scientific value, and rigor and outline an agenda with 12 open challenges spanning four areas, including foundation, methodology, application, and community. We encourage discussions, debates, and innovative efforts toward more rigorous and impactful VA research.

VisImages: A Fine-Grained Expert-Annotated Visualization Dataset.

Images in visualization publications contain rich information, e.g., novel visualization designs and implicit design patterns of visualizations. A systematic collection of these images can contribute to the community in many aspects, such as literature analysis and automated tasks for visualization. In this paper, we build and make public a dataset, VisImages, which collects 12,267 images with captions from 1,397 papers in IEEE InfoVis and VAST. Built upon a comprehensive visualization taxonomy, the dataset includes 35,096 visualizations and their bounding boxes in the images. We demonstrate the usefulness of VisImages through three use cases: 1) investigating the use of visualizations in the publications with VisImages Explorer, 2) training and benchmarking models for visualization classification, and 3) localizing visualizations in the visual analytics systems automatically.

In Defence of Visual Analytics Systems: Replies to Critics.

The last decade has witnessed many visual analytics (VA) systems that make successful applications to wide-ranging domains like urban analytics and explainable AI. However, their research rigor and contributions have been extensively challenged within the visualization community. We come in defence of VA systems by contributing two interview studies for gathering critics and responses to those criticisms. First, we interview 24 researchers to collect criticisms the review comments on their VA work. Through an iterative coding and refinement process, the interview feedback is summarized into a list of 36 common criticisms. Second, we interview 17 researchers to validate our list and collect their responses, thereby discussing implications for defending and improving the scientific values and rigor of VA systems. We highlight that the presented knowledge is deep, extensive, but also imperfect, provocative, and controversial, and thus recommend reading with an inclusive and critical eye. We hope our work can provide thoughts and foundations for conducting VA research and spark discussions to promote the research field forward more rigorously and vibrantly.

MetaGlyph: Automatic Generation of Metaphoric Glyph-based Visualization.

Glyph-based visualization achieves an impressive graphic design when associated with comprehensive visual metaphors, which help audiences effectively grasp the conveyed information through revealing data semantics. However, creating such metaphoric glyph-based visualization (MGV) is not an easy task, as it requires not only a deep understanding of data but also professional design skills. This paper proposes MetaGlyph, an automatic system for generating MGVs from a spreadsheet. To develop MetaGlyph, we first conduct a qualitative analysis to understand the design of current MGVs from the perspectives of metaphor embodiment and glyph design. Based on the results, we introduce a novel framework for generating MGVs by metaphoric image selection and an MGV construction. Specifically, MetaGlyph automatically selects metaphors with corresponding images from online resources based on the input data semantics. We then integrate a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm that explores the design of an MGV by associating visual elements with data dimensions given the data importance, semantic relevance, and glyph non-overlap. The system also provides editing feedback that allows users to customize the MGVs according to their design preferences. We demonstrate the use of MetaGlyph through a set of examples, one usage scenario, and validate its effectiveness through a series of expert interviews.

DashBot: Insight-Driven Dashboard Generation Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Analytical dashboards are popular in business intelligence to facilitate insight discovery with multiple charts. However, creating an effective dashboard is highly demanding, which requires users to have adequate data analysis background and be familiar with professional tools, such as Power BI. To create a dashboard, users have to configure charts by selecting data columns and exploring different chart combinations to optimize the communication of insights, which is trial-and-error. Recent research has started to use deep learning methods for dashboard generation to lower the burden of visualization creation. However, such efforts are greatly hindered by the lack of large-scale and high-quality datasets of dashboards. In this work, we propose using deep reinforcement learning to generate analytical dashboards that can use well-established visualization knowledge and the estimation capacity of reinforcement learning. Specifically, we use visualization knowledge to construct a training environment and rewards for agents to explore and imitate human exploration behavior with a well-designed agent network. The usefulness of the deep reinforcement learning model is demonstrated through ablation studies and user studies. In conclusion, our work opens up new opportunities to develop effective ML-based visualization recommenders without beforehand training datasets.

Revisiting the Design Patterns of Composite Visualizations.

Composite visualization is a popular design strategy that represents complex datasets by integrating multiple visualizations in a meaningful and aesthetic layout, such as juxtaposition, overlay, and nesting. With this strategy, numerous novel designs have been proposed in visualization publications to accomplish various visual analytic tasks. However, there is a lack of understanding of design patterns of composite visualization, thus failing to provide holistic design space and concrete examples for practical use. In this article, we opted to revisit the composite visualizations in IEEE VIS publications and answered what and how visualizations of different types are composed together. To achieve this, we first constructed a corpus of composite visualizations from the publications and analyzed common practices, such as the pattern distributions and co-occurrence of visualization types. From the analysis, we obtained insights into different design patterns on the utilities and their potential pros and cons. Furthermore, we discussed usage scenarios of our taxonomy and corpus and how future research on visualization composition can be conducted on the basis of this study.

OBTracker: Visual Analytics of Off-ball Movements in Basketball.

In a basketball play, players who are not in possession of the ball (i.e., off-ball players) can still effectively contribute to the team's offense, such as making a sudden move to create scoring opportunities. Analyzing the movements of off-ball players can thus facilitate the development of effective strategies for coaches. However, common basketball statistics (e.g., points and assists) primarily focus on what happens around the ball and are mostly result-oriented, making it challenging to objectively assess and fully understand the contributions of off-ball movements. To address these challenges, we collaborate closely with domain experts and summarize the multi-level requirements for off-ball movement analysis in basketball. We first establish an assessment model to quantitatively evaluate the offensive contribution of an off-ball movement considering both the position of players and the team cooperation. Based on the model, we design and develop a visual analytics system called OBTracker to support the multifaceted analysis of off-ball movements. OBTracker enables users to identify the frequency and effectiveness of off-ball movement patterns and learn the performance of different off-ball players. A tailored visualization based on the Voronoi diagram is proposed to help users interpret the contribution of off-ball movements from a temporal perspective. We conduct two case studies based on the tracking data from NBA games and demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of OBTracker through expert feedback.

PassVizor: Toward Better Understanding of the Dynamics of Soccer Passes.

In soccer, passing is the most frequent interaction between players and plays a significant role in creating scoring chances. Experts are interested in analyzing players' passing behavior to learn passing tactics, i.e., how players build up an attack with passing. Various approaches have been proposed to facilitate the analysis of passing tactics. However, the dynamic changes of a team's employed tactics over a match have not been comprehensively investigated. To address the problem, we closely collaborate with domain experts and characterize requirements to analyze the dynamic changes of a team's passing tactics. To characterize the passing tactic employed for each attack, we propose a topic-based approach that provides a high-level abstraction of complex passing behaviors. Based on the model, we propose a glyph-based design to reveal the multi-variate information of passing tactics within different phases of attacks, including player identity, spatial context, and formation. We further design and develop PassVizor, a visual analytics system, to support the comprehensive analysis of passing dynamics. With the system, users can detect the changing patterns of passing tactics and examine the detailed passing process for evaluating passing tactics. We invite experts to conduct analysis with PassVizor and demonstrate the usability of the system through an expert interview.

Tac-Simur: Tactic-based Simulative Visual Analytics of Table Tennis.

Simulative analysis in competitive sports can provide prospective insights, which can help improve the performance of players in future matches. However, adequately simulating the complex competition process and effectively explaining the simulation result to domain experts are typically challenging. This work presents a design study to address these challenges in table tennis. We propose a well-established hybrid second-order Markov chain model to characterize and simulate the competition process in table tennis. Compared with existing methods, our approach is the first to support the effective simulation of tactics, which represent high-level competition strategies in table tennis. Furthermore, we introduce a visual analytics system called Tac-Simur based on the proposed model for simulative visual analytics. Tac-Simur enables users to easily navigate different players and their tactics based on their respective performance in matches to identify the player and the tactics of interest for further analysis. Then, users can utilize the system to interactively explore diverse simulation tasks and visually explain the simulation results. The effectiveness and usefulness of this work are demonstrated by two case studies, in which domain experts utilize Tac-Simur to find interesting and valuable insights. The domain experts also provide positive feedback on the usability of Tac-Simur. Our work can be extended to other similar sports such as tennis and badminton.

ForVizor: Visualizing Spatio-Temporal Team Formations in Soccer.

Regarded as a high-level tactic in soccer, a team formation assigns players different tasks and indicates their active regions on the pitch, thereby influencing the team performance significantly. Analysis of formations in soccer has become particularly indispensable for soccer analysts. However, formations of a team are intrinsically time-varying and contain inherent spatial information. The spatio-temporal nature of formations and other characteristics of soccer data, such as multivariate features, make analysis of formations in soccer a challenging problem. In this study, we closely worked with domain experts to characterize domain problems of formation analysis in soccer and formulated several design goals. We design a novel spatio-temporal visual representation of changes in team formation, allowing analysts to visually analyze the evolution of formations and track the spatial flow of players within formations over time. Based on the new design, we further design and develop ForVizor, a visual analytics system, which empowers users to track the spatio-temporal changes in formation and understand how and why such changes occur. With ForVizor, domain experts conduct formation analysis of two games. Analysis results with insights and useful feedback are summarized in two case studies.