Saaien Tist: 2011

Biovis/Visweek recap

Finally time to write something about the biovis/visweek conference I attended about a week ago in Providence (RI)... And I must say: they'll see me again next year. (Hopefully @infosthetics will be able to join me then). Meanwhile, several blog posts are popping up discussing it (see here and here, for example).

This was the first time that biovis (aka the IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization) was organized. It's similar to the 2-year old vizbi, but has an agenda that is more focused on research in visualization rather than application of visualization in the biological sciences. Really interesting talks, posters and people.

Oct

Humanizing Bioinformatics

I was invited last week to give a talk at this year's meeting of the Graduate School Structure and Function of Biological Macromolecules, Bioinformatics and Modeling (SFMBBM). It ended up being a day with great talks, by some bright PhD students and postdocs. There were 2 keynotes (one by Prof Bert Poolman from Groningen (NL) and one by myself), and a panel discussion on what the future holds for people nearing the end of their PhDs.

Sep

Visualize This (by Nathan Yau) arrived...

Last Friday I received my long-anticipated copy of "Visualize This" by Nathan Yau. On its website it is described as a "practical guide on visualization and how to approach real-world data". You can guess what my weekend looked like :-)

Overall, I believe this book is a very good choice for people interested in getting started in data visualization.

Jul

Visualizing the Tour de France

UPDATE: I encountered a blog post by Martin Theus describing a very similar approach for looking at this same data (see here).

Disclaimer 1: This is a (very!) quick hack. No effort was put in it whatsoever regarding aesthetics, interactivity, scaling (e.g. in the barcharts), ... Just wanted to get a very broad view of what happened during the Tour de France (= biggest cycling event each year).

Disclaimer 2: I don't know anything about cycling.

Jul

TenderNoise - visualizing noise levels

A couple of days ago I bumped into this tweet by Benjamin Wiederkehr (@datavis): "Article: TenderNoise http://datavis.ch/q9pIxq" It describes a visualization by Stamen Design and others displaying noise levels at different intersections in San Francisco. They recorded these levels over a period of a few days in order to get an idea of auditory pollution. More information is here.

Jun

Why did I move into data visualization?

Preamble: It's been very quiet on this blog since I left the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK and took my position here at Leuven University in Belgium last October. Truth is that the type of work changed so profoundly that it takes a while to give it all a place in your head; let alone a blog. Until I remembered this morning why I started this blog in the first place: to help me order my thoughts in the first place. So it might have sped things up instead, actually...

Anyway...

Mar

VizBi 2011 - looking back

Has been a while (again) since my last post. It seems that the requirements on my time are just a little bit different from during my previous position... But I'd like to share a little bit about the VizBi conference that I attended 2 weeks ago.

This second installment of the VizBi conference was held at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA.

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