Previous events

This 1-day interactive course provided a practical introduction to data visualization with Tableau Desktop, an industry-leading visualization tool. Attendees learned how to create effective visualizations by avoiding common mistakes and how to use Tableau by creating visualizations that range from bar and line charts to heat maps and geographic maps. Attendees then tackled six data analysis ‘challenges’. The course was taught by Professor Roy Ruddle.

In this masterclass, Roger Beecham explored the what, why, and how of Geovisualization. Attendees learned how to design visually engaging, data-rich geovisualizations (maps), techniques for incorporating uncertainty information into map designs and the benefits of relaxing or distorting geography when using maps for analysis. The session also addressed how to design maps to communicate research findings with integrity. The masterclass will be packed with examples, drawing extensively from Roger’s forthcoming book: https://vis4sds.github.io/vis4sds/.

Professor Roy Ruddle taught a fun but hard work (for attendees!) CPD course about the why, what, when and how to investigate data quality. Attendees learned about a multitude of data quality issues through school performance, traffic collision and dentist data challenges. See the Practitioner’s Guide to Data Quality

This Research IT course for tools for reproducible research ran over two half days.

Professor Roy Ruddle’s 14th March Visualization Masterclass attracted more than 100 people from the University and external public/private sector organisations. They learned about different types of chart and visual encoding, common mistakes people make and when to break the rules.

Staff from seven departments came to the LIDA Visualization Programme’s start-of-year networking event on 9^th Oct, and planned activities ranging from seminars and masterclasses to research showcases and hackathons.

The hackathon took place at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds and organised in public on GitHub under Prof Robin Lovelace’s personal account.

We had announced the event in early July on EventBrite only with no other publicity which was sold out weeks before the deadline (maximum 40 tickets). This was the first sign of the success of the event.

Mr Will Deakin from Network Rail joined the hackathon, as did Transport and GIS analysts from West Yorkshire Combined Authority, who participated in the morning demo session of the event. We also had participants travelling from London, as well as ITS and other colleagues across campus.

In the afternoon hackathon session, the number of attendees was ~16 divided into six teams working on various hack ideas including “Where do conflicts occur between accidents and bicycle network” and “Mapping Crime Data with Traffic Volume to Produce Safety Maps”.

The winners were a team of LIDA data scientists who worked on their hack idea, “Where do conflicts occur between accidents and bicycle network?”. The judges awarded the prize because their work fulfilled the three criteria: reproducible, attractive, and useful. The team also presented a clear story behind their work. In terms of techniques, they were using basic geocompuatation in Python programming language within Jupyter data science framework like other teams.

Another running of the Research Computing Team’s popular, introductory data visualisation course.

A talk from Professor Min Chen. Information loss has commonly been blamed as a cause of bad decisions. A close examination of the actuality (and the underlying mathematical descriptions) reveals that information loss is ubiquitous in data analysis, data visualization, statistical inference, machine learning, human decisions, and human communication. The ubiquity suggests some likely benefit of information loss. In this talk, the speaker will discuss the need to measure information loss systematically in data intelligence workflows (e.g., data visualization, machine learning, and pandemic modelling, etc.) in a way similar to many types of measurements, such as force and energy. Being able to measure information loss will allow us to optimise data intelligence workflows.

Professor Chen's research interests include data visualization, data science, computer graphics, computer vision, and human-computer interaction. He has co-authored over 200 publications, including his recent contributions in areas such as theory of visualization, video visualization, visual analytics, VIS4ML, and perception and cognition in visualization. He has worked on a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary research topics, ranging from the sciences to sports, and from digital humanities to cybersecurity.

This “sandpit” workshop attracted 21 people from Computing, Environment, Psychology, Transport Studies, the Research & Innovation Service and other departments. It was organised jointly in Helix by LIDA’s Visualization and Immersive Technologies Programmes. The morning featured talks about 3D graphics & virtual reality (VR), VR user interfaces, the immersive technology that is available in Virtuocity, the School of Computing and Helix, and urban analytics and environmental applications. In the afternoon we divided into groups to design and act out immersive visualization solutions for Hurricane Katrina Modelling and Adolescent Brain Development scenarios. “Fun, interesting, and useful!” was one participant’s comment.

We created this annual LIDA/CDRC training workshop in 2017, in cooperation with Tableau. This year’s 18 attendees work/studied in 10 different departments of the university. They learned how to create effective visualizations by avoiding common mistakes, use Tableau by creating a variety of visualizations (bar charts, line charts, heat maps, geographic maps, etc) and applied their knowledge by tackling a series of data analysis “challenges”.

See the event webpage for more information

This introductory data visualisation course run by the Research Computing Team was so popular that all 30 available places were snapped up with nine minutes of registration being opened. That’s even faster than the Glastonbury festival!

The LIDA Visualization Programme’s inaugural meeting brought together colleagues from Research Computing, the Research & Innovation Service, Transport Studies, Computing, Medicine, Geography, Environment and other departments to discuss visualization research, impact, and teaching. We shaped the Visualization Programme’s direction and planned activities for 2024 in the following sessions:

Quotes from attendees included:

• "I really enjoyed listening to how the multi-disciplinary attendees use their visualizations. The show-and-tell highlighted the broad scope of data viz."
• "It felt like a safe and transparent environment with no sign of hierarchy where everybody could share their thoughts about what we can achieve from this program. Exciting days!"
• “...I had some great conversations and got some good ideas for research topics for myself. I’m looking forward to the next one.”
• “...The emphasis on training and education within LIDA is particularly beneficial for students, and I am excited about the knowledge and insights this community will continue to offer.”
• “...This is particularly important to me as a postgraduate student studying Health Informatics with Data Science, where impactful visualisations can lead to improved health outcomes...”