Pierre Dragicevic

In this paper, we propose a general visual and interactive tool named Donatien that supports the comparison of collections of doc-uments like sets of documents evolving over time or query results coming from different sources. Our approach builds on previous work from differ-ent areas of research and conciliates visualization, interaction and opti-mization approaches. Sets of documents are represented by graphs where documents are nodes, and edges between nodes are relationships between documents. Our contribution is to combine (1) a layer mechanism that makes possible the superposition of different layers representing differ-ent sets of documents, (2) original deterministic layout strategies that facilitate comparisons across layers, and (3) an interaction model based on drag-and-drop that lets users manually adjust matchings between documents. Our approach is used in a real case study based on data ex-tracted from the InfoVis contest benchmark. The data used contains ap-proximatel...

ABSTRACT We experimentally evaluated a haptic touch slider in 8 parallel universes. The results were overall similar but exhibited surprisingly high variability in terms of statistical significance patterns. We discuss the general implications of these findings for empirical HCI research.

ABSTRACT Pointing on large displays with an indirect, relative pointing device such as a touchpad often requires clutching. This article introduces gliding, where the cursor continues to move during the clutching gestures. The effect is that of controlling the cursor as a detached object that can be pushed, with inertia and friction similar to a puck being pushed on a table. We analyze gliding from a practical and a theoretical perspective and report on two studies. The first controlled experiment establishes that gliding reduces clutching and can improve pointing performance for large distances. We introduce cursor efficiency to capture the effects of gliding on clutching. The second experiment demonstrates that participants use gliding even when an efficient acceleration function lets them perform the task without it, without degrading performance.

We present Bertifier, a web app for rapidly creating tabular visualizations from spreadsheets. Bertifier draws from Jacques Bertin's matrix analysis method, whose goal was to "simplify without destroying" by encoding cell values visually and grouping similar rows and columns. Although there were several attempts to bring this method to computers, no implementation exists today that is both exhaustive and accessible to a large audience. Bertifier remains faithful to Bertin's method while leveraging the power of today's interactive computers. Tables are formatted and manipulated through crossets, a new interaction technique for rapidly applying operations on rows and columns. We also introduce visual reordering, a semi-interactive reordering approach that lets users apply and tune automatic reordering algorithms in a WYSIWYG manner. Sessions with eight users from different backgrounds suggest that Bertifier has the potential to bring Bertin's method to a wider audience of both technical and non-technical users, and empower them with data analysis and communication tools that were so far only accessible to a handful of specialists.COMPUTER.

This paper presents a tool suite (made up of two previously unrelated approaches) for the engineering of multimodal Post-WIMP Interactive Systems. The first element of this integration is ICOM (a data-flow model dedicated to low-level input modelling) and its environment ICON which allows for editing and simulating ICOM models. The other element is ICOs (a formal description technique mainly dedicated to dialogue modelling) and its environment PetShop which allows for editing, simulating and verifying ICOs models. This paper shows how these two approaches have been integrated and how they support multimodal interactive systems engineering. We show on a classical rubber banding case study how these tools can be used for prototyping interactive systems. We also present in details how the changes in the interaction techniques impact the models at various levels of the software architecture.

Social networks collected by historians or sociologists typically have a large number of actors and edge attributes. Applying social network analysis (SNA) algorithms to these networks produces additional attributes such as degree, centrality, and clustering coefficients. Understanding the effects of this plethora of attributes is one of the main challenges of multivariate SNA. We present the design of GraphDice, a multivariate network visualization system for exploring the attribute space of edges and actors. GraphDice builds upon the ScatterDice system for its main multidimensional navigation paradigm, and extends it with novel mechanisms to support network exploration in general and SNA tasks in particular. Novel mechanisms include visualization of attributes of interval type and projection of numerical edge attributes to node attributes. We show how these extensions to the original ScatterDice system allow to support complex visual analysis tasks on networks with hundreds of actors and up to 30 attributes, while providing a simple and consistent interface for interacting with network data.