Section: Research Program

Software Infrastructures

We want to understand the requirements that software and hardware architectures should provide to support exploratory analysis of large amounts of data. So far, “big data” has been focusing on issues related to storage management and predictive analysis: applying a well-known set of operations on large amounts of data. Visual Analytics is about exploration of data, with sometimes little knowledge of its structure or properties. Therefore, interactive exploration and analysis is needed to build knowledge and apply appropriate analyses; this knowledge and appropriateness is supported by visualizations. However, applying analytical operations on large data implies long-lasting computations, incompatible with interactions, and generates large amounts of results, impossible to visualize directly without aggregation or sampling. Visual Analytics has started to tackle these problems for specific applications but not in a general manner, leading to fragmentation of results and difficulties to reuse techniques from one application to the other. We are interested in abstracting-out the issues and finding general architectural models, patterns, and frameworks to address the Visual Analytics challenge in more generic ways.