From Perception to Abstraction with Interaction and Visualization

Miguel Nacenta
Online! Please join us via Zoom. Email dfp-admin@dfp.ubc.ca for Zoom details.

I have always been interested in visual perception. A few years ago, my main goal was to take advantage of our understanding of the eye and the visual system in order to improve how humans see. As I worked on this goal, I started to veer towards information visualization: how we see could, perhaps, be leveraged for increasing understanding (a major topic in InfoVis). This forced me to consider higher-cognitive aspects of visualization, as well as the importance of the interactive process in understanding data. As I delved further, my goals morphed, and I find myself now in the business of trying to make people smarter. In this talk I will try to do two things: a) tell you the story of my (not that long) research journey from perception to abstraction, by using short and hopefully entertaining short introductions to some of my projects, and; b) to show you what I think will be interesting in the future of making people smarter, with an eye on establishing collaborations between researchers at DFP and our very new VIXI group.

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