IEEE InfoVis 2007 Contest

Tasks and Judging

The theme of the 2007 IEEE InfoVis Contest is InfoVis Goes to the Moviews. The data is based upon US movie releases, and this years contests tasks focus on innovative and effective information visualization design for finding and displaying data in this domain.

There are three tasks for 2007 IEEE InfoVis Contest. Entries will be evaluated on their strengths in each category individually—it is possible that a very strong entry in one category to win over a weak entry over all three categories.

Innovative Design

Information visualization is a design art as well as an interactive science. Perceptual and cognitive factors play a role in the manufacture of visualizations, but creative and inspiration also play a part in novel visualizations. This year's contest seeks to foster such innovative design.

For judging innovative design, the judges will utilize information provided by the entrants explaining their design choices. They should discuss why design choices were made, and whether they were based upon existing perceptual, cognitive, and visualization research and where inspiration and unorthodoxy entered into the process.

Effective Exploration

The power of computer-based visualization is its ability to facilitate visualization exploration via interactive rendering and manipulation of the data. Creative and effective means to control the novel visualization parameters are encouraged. Users must be able to manipulate all salient parameters of the exploration directly, and the correlation between parameter and result should be clear. In addition, the generation of the novel visualization must be reasonably interactive for the given data. It is permissible to subset the data, but they entry must make this clear. The tools for exploration must facilitate knowledge discovering within the data.

Interactive exploration will be evaluated based upon the video submitted as part of the contest submission and the corresponding stills in the write-up and on the web page. The video is required to show the visualization "running through its paces"—i.e., interactively stepping through the data. it important that the video demonstrate how the insight gained in the next task was discovered.

Data Specific Tasks

There are several theories about US mainstream cinema that can be addressed using the Movies data set. Several potential data questions to answer are:

• Do Best Actress Oscar winners tend to come from certain genres?
• Is there a correlation between box-office winners and Oscar winners in various categories? Which categories show a strong positive or negative correlation?
• What are the most "bankable" actors, actresses, directors or cinematographers? I.e., which of the above tend to generate strong box-office performance?
• Do "winning" groups on movie sets tend to work together?

Many other similar questions can be devised, and new sorts of questions are strongly suggested. The questions answered and how they were answered should be demonstrated in the submitted documentation.

Judging

Judges will be drawn from a collection of information visualization design and practice experts for the first phase of the judging; a second phase of the judging involving the conference general chair and steering committee members in order to determine if a final prize is to be awarded.