Ph.D. School on Visualization Software

摘要

Following the recent tradition of previous Symposia, the Organizing Committee of the 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization hosted a Ph.D. School on Visualization Software. The Ph.D. School was held at the National Technical University of Athens campus, September 22-23, 2016, and was attended by 16 participants. The Ph.D. School on Visualization Software consisted of two one-day tutorials on Tom Sawyer's Perspectives graph and data visualization system and yWorks' yFiles for Java diagramming software. Tom Sawyer Software and yWorks are two of the longstanding sponsors of the Graph Drawing Symposia. On September 22, 2016, Brendan Madden, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Tom Sawyer Software, gave an in-depth introduction to Tom Sawyer Software's research and practical work on graph drawing software. He demonstrated the broad capabilities of Tom Sawyer Perspectives graph and data visualization system and discussed how their software is now used in numerous industries including the public sector, in finance and fraud detection, IT, energy, telecommunications and networking, and in aerospace and manufacturing. On September 23, 2016, Christian Brunnermeier and Jasper Moller, Software Developers at yWorks, gave an overview over the yFiles product family, its main features and the underlying architecture. Some of the most prominent layout algorithms were presented, including their customization options to optimize the layout result and typical challenges when a theoretical algorithm meets real-life requirements. In a tutored practical session the participants worked in groups to fill a given demo application with life, building upon the presented topics e.g. finding a good layout for a given data set, presenting the business data in an appealing way and reducing visual complexity to make the data more approachable. We thank the National Technical University of Athens and the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences for their support. We also thank the speakers, Brendan Madden, Christian Brunnermeier and Jasper Moller, as well as all participants who turned the Ph.D. School on Visualization Software into a successful event.