Northern Visualization and Visual Analytics

Research group focus

In an age of data science and artificial intelligence, oversight and understanding of the data that we use are essential and require human comprehension. We study computational and human-centred perspectives for making data and models accessible to humans through visualisation. Our research aims to advance human-centred visualisation by addressing challenges in areas such as:

human-centred decision making
communication of multi-modal and multi-level data
data-driven storytelling
image perception
network visualisation
visualisation of incomplete data and uncertainty
visualisation in support of AI and HCAI
perceptual effectiveness of visualisations

Members of the NoVA group pose outside for a group photo

Research impact

The human stakeholder is at the heart of our research. We generate impact through interdisciplinary collaborations across data-driven domains. These include health, defence, agriculture, engineering, biosciences, education and more.

NoVA members designed visualisation to support validation and acceptance of digital mobility outcomes in the Mobilise-D project. The project monitored the daily life gait of people with various mobility problems. The aim was to inform drug and technology development, clinical practice, precision medicine, regulatory bodies and other stakeholders. Mobilise-D was a 5-year Innovative Medicines Initiative project, supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA. Participants included staff from 34 participating universities, hospitals, and industry organisations.

Edge bundling reduces visual clutter in graphs, but they can induce ambiguous diagrams when bundling unrelated edges together. Over a series of papers, our researchers have developed Edge-Path bundling techniques that have been deployed in graph visualisation software libraries such as edge-bundle (R), gggraph (R), Scimago Graphica, and yWorks (initial yFiles demos).

Key collaborators

We collaborate with academic, industrial and clinical partners across the UK and internationally, advancing human-centred data analytics and developing visualisation solutions to address data-driven challenges.

Current and past collaborators include:

Leeds Institute for Data Analytics
University College London
Digital Health Innovation in Ageing and Neurodegeneration group
Wolfson Childhood Cancer Research Centre
Great North Children’s Hospital
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology
Thales DMS
TU Wien, Austria
University of Cologne, France
University of Perugia, Italy
Monash University, Australia
University of Glasgow
Seoul National University, South Korea
C-Research, Linköping University, Sweden
Tableau Software, USA
YWorks, Germany
Unilever R&D

Group members

NoVA's website

Postgraduate research

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