CS 5764: Information Visualization

Homework #3:  Visualization Design

Visualizing Travel Schedules

The goal of this homework is to gain practice in designing new visualizations for new problems.  Your assignment is to produce and analyze two alternative designs for a visualization of travel schedules.

Data:  The general problem is as follows.  The data consists of a set of people traveling to various destinations around the country or world.  For each person, the data includes a list of destinations (name and geographic location), the time schedule (travel times, and length of stay), travel methods (e.g. airline, car, train, hitchhike,...).  Destinations include long stays as well as very short stays (e.g. flight layovers, stopping for the night when driving, etc).  The data could be for future or past schedules.  As to scalability, you should aim for as large a set of travelers and destinations as possible.

Example domains for this general problem are:

• Terrorist detection:   Intelligence agencies track the travel plans and histories of a large group of suspected terrorists.  Analysts discover potential attack plans or analyze previous attacks to identify likely terrorist participants.
• Business travel:  Travel managers must arrange good travel schedules for many distributed salespersons to diverse locations, including possible group meetings.

Insights:  Your visualization should provide insight into the travel schedules and the inter-relationships between them.  In the case of terrorist detection, typical tasks include:  

• when will each person be where?
• when and where are potential group meetings?  (e.g. so we can bomb them!)
• is anyone traveling together?  (e.g. potential hijacking)
• is anyone flying at same time in different locations?  (e.g. potential mass hijacking)
• are there multi-person delivery sequences?  (e.g. person A visits person B, then person B visits person C, ...)
• or information dissemination trees?  (e.g. person A visits B and C, ...)
• who doesn't seem to fit in with the rest?  (e.g. probably not a terrorist)

Design Space:  The fundamental issue in this problem is the relationship between time and geography. Wrestle with the alternatives for relating them.

Submit:  4 pages describing your proposed solution visualization as follows:

• Describe the 2 designs.  For each design:
  • provide pictures (these can be drawn by hand with pencil, crayon, ...)
  • identify the visual mappings
  • interaction and navigation strategies
  • scalability (e.g. how many people and destinations)
  • claims analysis:  advantages and disadvantages, support for insights
• Identify the fundamental distinctions between the two designs in terms of the design space.  Identify the tradeoffs.

Format:  2 pages of pictures (1 page per design), 2 pages of text.  Be concise.  I like bullets.

!Important:  Focus your time on creating and analyzing low-fidelity designs, not development.

Hand in:  hardcopy due in class, Thurs Oct 7.