Keynote I: Reaching Our Users
Dr. Catherine Plaisant
August 30 Wednesday 8:30am to 9:45am
As our field matures, the tools and ideas described in our research
publications are reaching users. How can we make sure we develop
powerful visual tools that can deal with user diversity (age, language,
disabilities, etc.) but also with the variety of technology used and the
gaps in user's knowledge? Another challenge is to adequately study the
impact of our technologies. We will review many examples, and discuss
evaluation methods and the emergence of Multi-dimensional In-depth
Long-term Case studies (MILCs) to study the creative activities that
users engage in.
About Dr. Catherine Plaisant
Dr. Catherine Plaisant is Associate Research Scientist at the
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of the University of Maryland
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. She earned a Doctorat
d'Ingenieur degree in France in 1982. In 1987 she joined the
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. Her research contributions range
from focused user interaction techniques (e.g. Excentric Labeling) to
innovative visualizations (such as LifeLines for personal records or
SpaceTree for hierarchical data exploration) and interactive search
interface techniques such as Query Previews. She has written over 90
refereed technical publications and recently co-authored with Ben
Shneiderman the 4th Edition of "Designing the User Interface".
Catherine Plaisant http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/members/cplaisant/
Keynote II:
Using Multi-Media to support Command and Control in Crisis
Management Systems
Dr. Erland Jungert
August 31 Thursday 8:30am to 9:45am
Societies have always been challenged by different kinds
of crises, disasters and difficult times. During such challenging
events society must be able to deal with the situations
that often require major efforts. It is thus important to
be aware of which resources that are needed to handle
these crises. As a consequence, tools that can support command
and control functionality in various types of crisis
management systems are needed. These tools should support
both proactive and operative crisis management, that
is, they are needed to support the prevention of those situations
that may occur as well as operative handling of ongoing
crises. They must also be able to handle the uncertain
situations related to crises where the conditions hastily can
change. Consequently, crucial qualities needed in the crisis
management systems will include situational and crisis
awareness. Furthermore, to achieve reliable command and
control functionality, supporting net centric crisis management
means for collection, analysis, handling, visualization
as well as exchange of large amounts data between
different users are necessary. These data are generally of
spatial/temporal type and originate in most cases from
multiple sensor data sources. For these reasons techniques
for handling multi-media data in various ways are required
when developing command and control functionalities in
crisis management systems. Other corner-stones, besides
the above mentioned, that touches upon multi-media
aspects in connection to crisis management architectures,
are command and control models, service related structures,
distributed ontologies and models of information
flow.
Proactive aspects of crisis management are quite often
dealing with physical protection of facilities that eventually
can be subject to different types of threats. Historically,
such systems can be seen as simple alarm systems
i.e. the threat becomes a reality and the alarm is activated.
Most of the time, when the alarm goes off the effects of the
possible actions that can be carried out are limited since
nothing or very little can be done to prevent the consequences
of the activated threats. For these reasons, the surroundings
of the facilities must be subject to intelligent
over long periods of time to achieve knowledge about
possible activities that may be set into effect by antagonistic
individuals or groups of individuals. Multi-media systems
can here play an important role to achieve a higher
degree of security. For instance, by supporting the detection
of anomalous behavior.
In this presentation aspects of multi-media will be discussed
in connection to techniques that can be used to give
the society higher levels of security both before and during
crises. Other techniques and methods that may influence
the design of multi-media systems for support of crisis
management systems will be discussed as well. Among
these are information fusion, interoperability and means for
situation awareness.
About Dr. Erland Jungert
Erland Jungert has a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of
Linköping, Sweden, 1980. Currently he is Director of Compute Science Research
at FOI, Linköping, Sweden since 1987 and since 1998 he is also part time
professor in Geoinformatics at the Department of Computer and Information
Science, at Linköping University. He has also been visiting Associate Professor
at the department of Electrical Engineering, at the Illinois Institute of
Technology, Chicago, Ill. in1985-1986. Dr Jungert is co-author of one book on
spatial reasoning and the co-editor of two other books on Visual Languages and
on Intelligent Database Systems. Furthermore, he is also associate editor of the
journal of Visual Languages and Computing. His interests are concerned with
methods for spatial reasoning, query languages especially for sensor data
sources. Lately, he has developed an interest for command and control systems
for crisis management also including techniques and methods for prevention of
crises and antagonistic threat activities.