COVID-19

Dear All,

We are thrilled to announce a new series of DataVis Meetups this year. We have our first session this Thursday, March 10, from 5pm-6pm. We are hosting Dr. Daniel Archambault (University of Swansea) on “So, what have you been up to over the last couple of years? A visual analytics response to the COVID-19 pandemic”. Abstract and Bio below.

For now, meetups will still be online until we obtain clearance from the University that we can fit people into our usual room. We will have our next two sessions planned on April 28 and May 26th respectively, following our old tradition to host a Meetup each last Thursday of the Month. We will announce speakers and talks here, soon.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Abstract: In March 2020, COVID-19 became a global pandemic which prompted the introduction of a variety of different and often intrusive policies by various governments to curb the spread of the disease. During this time, the scientific community was called to action to understand the effectiveness of these policies before and while they are being applied and to model future policy scenarios. As a visualisation researcher with a specialisation in network analysis, it became clear visual analytics, specifically visual analytics of networks, could play a role in the data science effort in helping the United Kingdom combat the spread of COVID-19. In this talk, I present my work over the past two years on developing contact tracing visual analytics systems for a variety of audiences: epidemiologists, the general public, and schoolchildren.

Bio: Daniel Archambault received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia, Canada in 2008. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. His principal area of research is the scalable interactive visualisation of networks in both static and dynamic settings. He also has interests in many areas of information visualisation, visual analytics, visualisation for AI, text analysis and visualisation, social media analytics, and perceptual factors in visualisation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he led a team of six visualisation and visual analytics researchers in creating systems to help a variety of communities understand contact tracing and covid modelling. https://cs.swansea.ac.uk/~csdarchambault/

++++ Data Vis Meetup Edinburgh Benjamin Bach Brendan Hill Uta Hinrichs

People involved

• Uta Hinrichs (Google Scholar)
• Benjamin Bach (Google Scholar)
• Brendan Hill