Almost Half a Million
Profs. Matt Ward and Elke Rundensteiner were recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their research in developing tools and techniques to support interactive visual exploration of large data sets.
Their previous grant, which ran from 1998 to 2001, focused on using hierarchical clustering to represent large data sets at various levels of detail. They customized several multidimensional visualization techniques to convey cluster information, and developed new interactive tools to support user navigation and view control, as well as novel database techniques to improve the performance of data retrieval during the exploration process.
The new grant, which is for $440,000 over three years, extends the earlier concepts to address issues involving data sets with very large numbers of dimensions, as well as data sets that include textual, rather than just numeric fields.
All of their work is being implemented in a public-domain visualization package, XmdvTool, initially developed by Prof. Ward in 1994. For more information, please visit the XmdvTool web page.