Open Tech Calendar

The 2nd of our summer talks, by Christopher Collins, Ontario Tech Institute, OT. Join us at
eu.bbcollab.com

This talk will be 30min, followed by 30min for questions and discussion.

Thu, July 9th, 5:30pm

Abstract: Text is one of the most prominent forms of open data available, from social media to legal decisions. Visual Text Analytics combines text data processing techniques with interactive visualizations to provide ways to observe trends, discover patterns, and find the right thing to read in large collections of text. I argue that text visualization is not a replacement for reading but can help someone form questions about a large text collection, then drill down to investigate through targeted reading of the underlying source documents. In this presentation I will overview some of the biggest challenges in working with text and highlight some case studies in visualizing text in a variety of domains, from security and passwords to digital humanities.

Bio: Dr. Christopher Collins holds the Canada Research Chair in Linguistic Information Visualization and is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Ontario Tech University. His research focus is interdisciplinary, combining information visualization and human-computer interaction with natural language processing to address the challenges of information management and the problems of information overload. Dr. Collins has published over 80 peer-reviewed contributions, many in top-tier venues such as ACM ToCHI and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. His research has been featured in the New York Times Magazine and CBS Sunday Morning. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Dr. Collins is a past member of the executive of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee and sits on the IEEE VIS Conference Organizing Committee.

Web: vialab.science.uoit.ca