Jan. 20, 2021, a paper titled “IGScript: An Interaction Grammar for Scientific Data Presentation [1]” was officially accepted by ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI’21) from DTVIS research group, which is leading by Dr. Richen Liu. Dr Liu, a junior undergraduate Min Gao and a sophomore undergraduate Shunlong Ye are the first three authors. The paper has 17 pages in double column (14 pages with additional 3 pages of Appendix). ACM SIGCHI is a CCF A top-tier international conference and is one of the most influential academic conferences.

 

This paper aiming at domain scientists who are not familiar with programming, and helps them automatically build script-driven data story animation for scientific data. In this paper, a new concept of “Interaction Grammar” is first proposed and used to construct script languages following the style of natural languages. The authors develop a light-weight special-purpose compiler for domain scientists who are not familiar with programming and designs several algorithms based on efficient dictionary tree. A query algorithm on Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data, a combination algorithm across these queries are designed and implemented by a binary tree. Besides, an overview-to-details algorithm, an automatic virtual shot assignment scheme and an automatic tracking algorithm based on flow field data are further proposed. It allows us to customize identifiers and script codes’ semantic structures for scientists in different domains, allowing ordinary users who are not familiar with complex computation or GPU rendering to build an automatical script-driven data story animation in a well-designed dual-space.

 

All the reviewers thought the idea of this paper is novel and this paper make a strong contribution to CHI community. They thought this paper has “good potential application”, “make this work stand out compared to existing grammars and languages”, etc.. More importantly, the reviewers also thought this work is “useful to create a scripted visualization in the style of NASA animations or biomedical animations”.

 

Data story animation can help domain experts or ordinary users better understand the data feature, for example, a data story animation about the time-varying evolution for a lung infection by COVID-19 is significant for ordinary users to realize the presented scientific essence.

 

[1] Richen Liu, Min Gao, Shunlong Ye, and Jiang Zhang. IGScript: An Interaction Grammar for Scientific Data Presentation. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI’21), pages x:1-x:14, Yokohama, Japan, May. 8-13, 2021. refer to homepage: “https://dabigtou.github.io/richenliu/”