Colloquium Computer Science, Dr. Marc Streit, Johannes Kepler University

Title:    Leveraging Provenance for
Storytelling, Reproducibility, and Recall

Abstract:

The primary goal of visual data exploration tools is to enable the discovery of new insights. To justify and reproduce insights, the discovery process needs to be documented and communicated. A common approach to documenting and presenting findings is to capture visualizations as images or videos. Images, however, are insufficient for telling the story of visual discovery, as they lack full provenance information and context. Videos are difficult to produce and edit, particularly due to the nonlinear nature of the exploration process. Most importantly, however, neither approach provides the opportunity to return to any point in the exploration in order to review the state of the visualization in detail or to conduct additional analyses. In this talk, I will introduce our efforts to more tightly integrate biomedical data exploration with the presentation of discoveries. Based on provenance data captured during the exploration process, users can extract key steps, add annotations, and author 'Vistories', visual stories based on the history of the exploration. These Vistories can be shared for others to view, but also to retrace and extend the original analysis. I will demonstrate how such methods can increase the reproducibility of cancer research and drug discovery. The presented work is part of the Caleydo project ( http://www.caleydo.org ), which is a long-running collaboration between JKU Linz, Harvard University and the University of Utah.