(Vis + Prov) ×

1st IEEE Workshop on
Visualization and Provenance Across Domains

October 23rd, 2023 at IEEE VIS in Melbourne, Australia

Our ambition is to build this into a series of workshops, targeting a different research community outside visualization each year, and eventually create a provenance research network that connects all the relevant communities.

For this year, we will target the database community, which is one of the first communities to formalize provenance research, providing the theoretical foundations such as the widely adopted W3C PROV specifications. Recently provenance and visualization have been adopted to address core database challenges such as query, workflow, and dependency. There is a clear need to build closer connections between the two communities. The workshop’s main goals are:

  • To establish and improve the collaboration between the visualization and database community on provenance-related research through a discussion of challenges that span both communities;
  • To further advance data provenance research within the database community to address the latest challenges, such as support for big data management, data processing, data sharing, or query optimization supported by provenance;
  • To further advance analytic provenance research within the visualization community to address the latest challenges, such as support for machine learning and visualization reproducibility.

Scope of Topics

While we are interested in any submissions at the intersection of provenance and visualization, we are especially focused on:

  • What can we learn when contrasting the problems of these two communities? Is there any visualization problem that can benefit from a database/analytic provenance method or vice versa?
  • What are the most pressing provenance-related challenges in the database community? Is there any visualization-related solution to them? For example,
    • What visualization techniques may be used to assist the database community in constructing retrospective and prospective provenance that are more interactive, scalable, and user-friendly?
      • How can query languages be supported from the standpoint of provenance and visualization?
  • What are the opportunities for provenance in emerging visualization research areas such as machine learning visualization and visualization reproducibility? For example,
    • How do we show changes to visualizations, interactions, or algorithms over time in various domains, including progressive visualizations, interactive visualizations, and machine learning training?
    • How do we transparently and efficiently share visualizations and their production processes?

Important Dates

July 15, 2023: Paper submission deadline

August 3, 2023: Paper author notification

August 13, 2023: Paper camera-ready version deadline

Notice: all times are midnight Anywhere on Earth (AOE)

Program Schedule

Notice: all times are Melbourne Time (GMT+11)

09:00-09:10

Introduction and Welcome

09:10-09:40

Paper Image Dr. Boris Glavic Personal/Lab Website
Database KeyNote: Quid pro quo - Provenance for Visualization and Visualization for Provenance

In this talk he will survey work at the intersection of provenance (in databases) and visualization. He will discuss how visualization techniques may be essential in overcoming challenges in data provenance / explanations such as how to effectively communicate complex and large provenance graphs. Furthermore, he will argue that provenance techniques can be utilized to overcome challenges in visualization. e.g., by enabling fast refresh of updated visualizations and for helping users to contextualize visualizations through understanding how a visualization was produced. Furthermore, he will cover some recent research on using approximate provenance to speed-up query answering that can potentially be applied when refreshing visualizations.

Bio: Boris Glavic is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology leading the IIT DBGroup. His research spans several areas of database systems and data science including data provenance, data integration, query execution and optimization, uncertain data, and data curation. Boris strives to build systems that are based on solid theoretical foundations.

09:40-10:10

Paper Presentations

10:15-10:45

Coffee Break ☕

10:45-11:15

Paper Image Dr. Alexander Lex Personal/Lab Website
Visualization KeyNote: Provenance as a Bridge Between Data Analysis Modalities

In visualization, provenance is widely used for action recovery, to document analysis processes, and to analyze user behavior. In this talk, however, he will focus on an exciting application of provenance: to bridge between code-based and interactive and visual data analysis. Code-based and interactive data analysis have different strengths and weaknesses. Some operations can be more easily executed in one than in the other. Interactive visualization tends to be more “natural” and easier to understand, but code-based analysis is typically more reproducible. While traditionally these two approaches can’t be easily combined, He’ll show how we can leverage provenance data to tackle these issues and design a truly integrated analysis environment.

Bio: Alexander Lex is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. He directs the Visualization Design Lab where he and his team develop visualization methods and systems to help solve today’s scientific problems. Recently he is working on visualization accessibility, visual misinformation, provenance and reproducibility, and user study infrastructure. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and multiple best paper awards or best paper honorable mentions at IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and other conferences. He also received a best dissertation award from his alma mater. He co-founded Datavisyn, a startup company developing VA solutions for the pharmaceutical industry.

11:15-11:55

Breakout Group Discussions

11:55-12:00

Workshop Wrap-up & Synthesis

Submission

We will accept research papers/extended abstracts or position papers. Your submission should be commensurate with the level of contribution but is required to be at least 2 pages (plus references). Papers must follow the IEEE VIS TVCG Journal submissions guidelines and be submitted through the Precision Conference System (PCS) . Your submission should be anonymized to facilitate a double-blind review between authors and the conference organizers. Accepted authors will be invited to post their work in an arXiv collection (which will not be considered archival). We are in contact with journals about the possibility of a special issue for the work accepted by this workshop.

Organizers

Kai Xu University of Nottingham

Michelle Dowling Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

John Wenskovitch Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Jeremy E. Block University of Florida

Yilin Xia University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign


Steering Committee

Bertram Ludascher University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Age Chapman University of Southampton

Program Committee

TBD.