Open Tech Calendar

6.30 for pizza and beers.

Data Viz special

7pm Talk One: "Interactive Visualisations for Data Exploration and Explanation" - Benjamin Bach

Talk Two: "Data Visualisation For Complex Engineering Drawings In The Oil & Gas Industry" - Dr Carlos Moreno Garcia

==============
Talk 1 "Interactive Visualizations for Data Exploration and Explanation" - Benjamin Bach

This talk presents a set of interactive visualizations for data exploration and recent work in how to communicate insights through data-driven stories. Among examples for exploring dynamic networks (vistorian.net), I discuss data comics as a novel approach to communicate not only changes in temporal data but to weave narration, textual explanations, and data visualizations (datacomics.net). The questions raised by the talk are about effective ways to engage a larger audience in understanding, learning, and use of visualizations for exploration and communication. As visualizations are becoming more and more commonplace and familiar to people, we can see more and more aspects of our daily lives being potentially enriched with information presented visually. Eventually, I want to raise the question of which role novel technology such as Augmented and Virtual Reality can play in exploring, communicating, and interacting with visualizations.

Bio:
Benjamin is a Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization at the University of Edinburgh. His research designs and investigates interactive information visualizations to help people explore, present, and understand information hidden in data. He focuses on the visualization of dynamic networks (e.g., social networks, brain connectivity networks), as well as temporal data (e.g., changes in videos and Wikipedia articles, events on timelines), comics for storytelling with visualizations, as well as visualization and interaction in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2017, Benjamin worked as a postdoc at Harvard University, Monash University, as well as the Microsoft-Research Inria Joint Centre. Benjamin was visiting researcher at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research in 2015. He obtained his PhD in 2014 from the Université Paris Sud where he worked at the Aviz Group at Inria.

Talk 2 - "Data Visualisation For Complex Engineering Drawings In The Oil & Gas Industry"

The Oil & Gas industry is in an urgent need of migrating printed assets, such as maps, logs and engineering drawings, towards a paperless environment. This task, also known as document image digitalisation, requires a set of state-of -the-art and novel techniques capable of identifying how the pixels that conform the document constitute the different components of such asset, such as text, symbols and lines. In the case of complex engineering drawings such as Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs), it is also a need to convert the digitalised information into meaningful data. This process, known as contextualisation, can lead to applications which are essential for security assessment in Oil & Gas facilities, such as tools that facilitate the visualisation of diagrams according to specific needs. In this talk, Dr Carlos Moreno Garcia will showcase the work done by the Robert Gordon University research group related on digitalisation, contextualisation and visualisation of complex engineering drawings for the case of P&IDs.

Dr Carlos Moreno Garcia is a lecturer in computing at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. He previously worked as a research fellow in a collaboration project with DNV GL related on digitalisation of engineering diagrams. His current research interests are data science, machine learning and patter recognition applied on computer vision, document image analysis, health, amongst others.

*****************************
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash