The rapidly expanding field of biology creates enormous challenges for data visualization techniques that enable researchers to gain insight from their large and highly complex data sets. The BioVis Interest Group organizes this interdisciplinary workshop at IEEE VIS, covering aspects of visualization in biology. This workshop brings together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities with the purpose of educating, inspiring, and engaging visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization. The goal of this workshop is to create synergies and spark potential future collaborations between domain experts and vis researchers around state-of-the-art biology-driven challenges.
BioVis Challenges Workshop is a half-day event organised in conjunction with IEEE VIS 2018 taking place on October 21st to October 26th, 2018 in Berlin, Germany. The workshop will be held on October 22nd, 2018 in the morning session, and will be focusing on a state-of-the-art biological challenge that requires a concerted effort from researchers in visualisation and biology to be addressed effectively. The event will kick-off with a keynote from a biology expert where challenges in a particular domain are presented, related data sources and existing efforts are discussed, and eventually a series of motivating scientific questions are posed to motivate the rest of the event. Following the keynote, the session will involve hands-on activity by groups of visualisation researchers, paired up with a domain scientist. Groups will be working on the sub-problems highlighted at the keynote, characterising the problem further, and sketching solutions and ideas in a format that best suits them (from pen and paper, to sketchy prototypes) to eventually develop a proposal for further research. The event will then conclude with the groups reporting back their approach, and participants will be encouraged to continue working on the problems through further collaborations using their produced proposals as a starting point. The output of the workshop will be a list of well-characterized visualization challenges within the context of the problem domain. The organizers, together with the participants, will externalize these challenges in the form of a report or publication following the event.
The number of individuals in studies that are collecting clinical, genomic, and other biomedical data has been growing rapidly in recent years. For example, the UK Biobank currently makes data for 500,000 individuals available and the National Institutes of Health All of Us Program aims to collect data on a million individuals over the next few years. Similar data collection and organization efforts are also taking place at hospitals and private companies in the pharma and healthcare sectors. The breadth of these collections is also growing significantly with the increasing availability of different data channels and personal sensors, adding new layers of richness and valuable information.
In this workshop, we will discuss what unique data visualization challenges visualization of data from such studies are posing and how the visualization community can contribute to the success of those studies. This will include questions focused on visual design and interaction, but also technical and legal challenges related to data access, for a broad range of data types and driving biomedical questions.
We are in the process of determining the speakers for the workshop and will post the updates on this page. A link to last year’s workshop is below.
2017 - BioVis Challenges Workshop @ IEEE VIS 2017, Phoenix, Arizona, US
Cagatay Turkay, City, University of London, UK
Nils Gehlenborg, Harvard Medical School, USA