cs5764: Information Visualization

Homework #3:  Visualization Design

Visualizing Travel Schedules

Due:  Wed Nov 20, in class.  Optional!

The goal of this homework is to gain practice in designing new visualizations for new problems by rapid brainstorming and sketching.  Your assignment is to produce a design for a visualization of travel schedules.  This is a tricky problem that combines many of the information types we discussed in class.  Hence, simply applying one of the existing tools we discussed will likely not work well.  A custom solution is needed.

Data:  The general problem is as follows.  The data consists of a set of people traveling to various destinations around the 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).  Note that timezones mean same times at different locations have different clock times/dates.  The data could be for future or past schedules.  As to scale, you should shoot 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.

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

What to hand in:  About 3 pages describing your proposed solution visualization as follows:

• 1 page of pictures.  These can be hand-drawn with pencil (crayon!) and paper.  The intent is low-fidelity rapid prototyping, not development.
• 2 pages of description.  This should be typed.  Include:
  • Describe the pictures and interaction as needed.  
  • Describe how far your solution scales up (how many people and destinations).  
  • Describe what is good and bad about your solution, or any tradeoff decisions that you made (no solution solves everything!).

!Important:  Focus your time on thinking and dreaming up designs.  Don't waste your time trying to draw it in PowerPoint or making it functional.