III: Small: RUI: Collaborative Research: ANTE – A Four-Tier Framework to Boost Visual Literacy for High Dimensional Data

The National Science Foundation
Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI)

Award Date: 08/27/2015 | Award Amount: $64,338 | Effective Dates: 09/01/2015 – 08/31/2018 | Award ID: IIS- 1527112

Project Personnel: Principal Investigator Kristina Striegnitz (Computer Science)

Project Summary:
There is now a great demand for individuals that have the skills to extract meaning from data. Academic programs in data science been created in many institutions, but going back to school to formally study this topic is not possible for a large segment of the population. In addition, not everyone really needs to become a formal data scientist to be competitive in this increasingly data-centric society and workplace where it can be of great benefit to become more data literate. Visualizations, such as the bar charts, line plots, maps, etc. that most people are familiar with, are helpful in explaining data. However, today’s data sets often combine many different kinds of information and are, therefore, too complex to be represented with these basic visualizations. The goal of this project is to develop a visualization system that can represent data in such a way that a user can make sense of complex data without extensive training. This will involve advances in visualization techniques as well as novel approaches to presenting visualizations in an engaging way. The ANTE (Appeal, Narrate, Transform, Engage) system developed in this project has good potential to help increase the ability of citizens to become more knowledgeable participants in an increasingly data-centric society. The project provides research training for graduate students at SUNY Stony Brook and undergraduate students at Union College. The visualization tools and games will make an excellent environment for teaching both data and visual literacy, at all education levels.