As it ends, I’m going to write-up some thoughts about each conference from VisWeek: VAST, Vis, and InfoVis. I certainly can’t include everything, but will try to post some links to the points that hit me the hardest.

The VAST keynote by Andrew Glassner was “Using Stories to Discover Patterns”. I believe his basic premise to tell stories with visualizations and he had a lot of good advice about story-telling in general, but I wish he had some example visualizations which succeeded because they told a story.

Carlos Scheidegger at visualization, etc has a good write-up of the Spatio-temporal paper session.

Kwan-liu Ma’s students were everywhere doing interesting work.

The time-varying vector fields was great. Christopher Garth gave a useful introduction to the background material in this area, which was particularly useful to a outsider like myself. GPU-based approaches were discussed by Jens KrĂŒger. Hank Childs also presented on large data.

The VAST capstone panel, “How Interactive Visualization Can Assist Investigative Analysis: Views and Perspectives from Domain Experts” was with Joe Parry, researcher in visualization systems for intelligence analysts; Lawrence Hunter from the OECD; and Sarah Cohen, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist now at Duke University. Joe Parry posted an outline of his thoughts (and also spoke with no slides, the only speaker I saw at the conference do that).

The Vis and InfoVis conferences end tomorrow, so hopefully I can post about them in the next few days.