Visual Tool Generates Researcher Profiles

How can we assess the experience and expertise of a researcher? The visualization group has developed a web-based visual analytics tool that generates profiles of researchers in the form of interactive reports.

Natural language generation meets visualization a novel approach for presenting publication records

How can we assess the experience and expertise of a researcher? In addition to the formal resumé, publication records play an important role in answering this question. Analyzing these records provides insights into researchers’ careers, such as their publication statistics, evolution of research topics, coauthor relationships, and collaboration groups. However, reporting this extracted information in a comprehensive yet easy-to-understand manner is a challenge. The visualization group of Fabian Beck suggests an unorthodox and novel approach using automatically generated text in combination with visualizations to convey the information in a clear and self-explanatory way. Beck and his colleagues argue that the close integration of text and visualizations not only provides explicit explanations but also supports the exploratory analysis through interactions.

The visualization group has developed VIS Author Profiles (VAP), a web-based visual analytics tool that generates researchers profiles in the form of interactive reports. VAP can help hiring managers to recruit research personnel, it can help researchers to find collaborators, students to find potential supervisors, and help research program committees to recruit members. The VAP system is accessible online.

The corresponding paper has been accepted for publication in the renowned journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) and will be presented at IEEE VIS 2018 in Berlin, Germany.