Email Viz Future Directions

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Email VizFuture Directions

• Marti Hearst
• UC Berkeley

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Outline

• Important Infoviz Principle
• Tough Data Mining Problem
• The infrequent important thing
• Interfaces tailored to user goals
• Intelligence Analysts
• Investigative Reporters
• Promising Future Directions
• Integration of task, viz, and content analysis
• Mixed-Initiative Interaction

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Important InfoViz Principle

• Distinguish between

PRESENTATION
ANALYSIS
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Tough Data Mining Problem

• Its easy to see the main trends
• But often we want the rare but unexpected and
  important event
• Russian oil company example
• Schwarzenegger and Enron
• Cigarettes and kids
• Person on the periphery who is working stealthily
  to influence things
• Deep throat

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Intelligence Analysts
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Intelligence Analysts

• Interviews wit active counter-terrorist analysts
• Great diversity in
• Goals
• Computing environments
• Biggest problems are social/systemic
• Many mundane IT problems as well

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Mundane IT Problems

• System incompatibilities
• Data reformatting
• Data cleaning
• Documenting sources
• Archiving materials

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Intelligence Analysts Problem 1

• Look at a series of reports, images,
  communication patterns
• Try to build a model of what is going on
• Follow leads
• Compare to previous situations
• Recent problem
• Groups are changing their behavior patterns
  quickly
• Very little use of sophisticated software tools

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Intelligence Analysts Problem 2

• Given a large collection
• Roll around in the data
• See what has been touched
• Tools should indicate which parts of the
  collection have been examined and which have yet
  to be looked at, and by whom
• View data in several different ways
• Data reduction methods such as MDS, SVD, and
  clustering often hide important trends.

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Intelligence Analysts Problem 2

• Dont show the obvious
• e.g., Cheney is president
• Dont show what youve already shown
• Only show the most recent version
• Show which info is not present
• Changes in the usual pattern
• Something stops happening

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Intelligence Analysts Problem 3

• Prepare a very short executive summary for the
  purposes of policy making
• Really the culmination of a cascade of summaries
• Reps from different agencies meet and pow-wow
  to form a view of the situation
• Rarely, but crucially, must be able to refer back
  to original sources and reasoning process for
  purposes of accountability

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Investigative Reporter Example

• Looking for trends in online literature
• Create, support, refute hypotheses

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Investigative Reporter Example
Clustering Corpus-level statistics,
Co-occurrence statistics Contrasting collection
statistics
What are the current main topics? What are the
new popular terms? How do they track with the
news?
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Investigative Reporter Example
Named-entity recognition Creating a list of
terms Apply the list to a Subcollection Create
regex rules with POS information
How long after a new Star Trek series comes on
the air before characters from the series appear
in stories?
How often do Klingons initiate attacks against
Vulcans, vs. the converse?
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Integration

• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, IBM systems
  Journal 40(4), 2001
• The system integrates
• Real tasks (CRM, patent analysis)
• Content analysis
• Information Visualization

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• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, 2001
• Docs containing windows 98

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CRM

• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, 2001

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• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, 2001

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• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, 2001

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• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, 2001

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• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, 2001

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• TAKMI, by Nasukawa and Nagano, 2001

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Mixed-Initiative Interaction

• Balance control between user and agent
• In Spotfire demo, system adjusts axes after
  other category hidden
• EDA
• User selects a subset of data based on
  interesting-looking grouping
• System then does stats on this subset in the
  background while user continues to work
• Then system notifies user of interesting trends
• See the AIDE system
• St. Amant, R., Dinardo, M. D., and Buckner, N.
  (2003). Balancing Efficiency and Interpretability
  in an Interactive Statistical Assistant.
  Proceedings of IUI.