UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The last Institute for CyberScience (ICS) Data Visualization Workshop for the 2017-18 academic year will cover the process, from start to finish, of creating data visualizations. The workshop, which is free and open to the public, will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. on Monday, June 18, in 101 Althouse Lab. The workshop also will be available online via Zoom from 4 to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 19.
Those interested in participating can register for the in-person workshop or register for the Zoom workshop.
Organized and run by Patrick Dudas of ICS, the workshop will delve into the entire process of creating data visualizations, from a flat-file data set to an interactive visualization. These workshops are intended for participants who are interested in both web design and data visualizations.
“I’m both excited and sad to wrap up the Data Visualization Workshop for the summer,” Dudas said. “I had some great students, faculty and staff come through the program. It’s good to know that they were able to get a full education from the material.”
This workshop includes what Dudas calls "human factor" elements such as working with a client, understanding the intended audience, and designing a solution appropriate for a problem. This will incorporate concepts in human-computer interaction, front-end analysis, and usability studies. Dudas also will showcase how to create a basic webpage for the visualization.
By the end of the workshop, participants should have a strong grasp on the complete design "life cycle" for their own work and research.
Dudas is ICS's resident data visualization expert. He received his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh in information science, specializing in visualization and social networking. He has taught courses such as human factors in system design, data manipulation, and exploratory data analysis.
The Institute for CyberScience is one of the five interdisciplinary research institutes under the Office of the Vice President for Research and is dedicated to supporting cyber-enabled research across the disciplines. ICS builds an active community of researchers using computational methods in a wide range of fields through co-hiring of tenure-track faculty, providing seed funding for ambitious computational research projects, and offering access to high-performance computing resources through its Advanced CyberInfrastructure (ICS-ACI). With the support of ICS, Penn State researchers harness the power of big data, big simulation, and big computing to solve the world’s problems.