Visualization Challenge from Science Magazine

For people still reading MeshForum news, there is an interesting contest from Science Magazine: Visualization Challenge from Science Magazine (via Bill Ives):

I have written about visualizations of various science things on this blog including yesterday. Here is a contest on the topic. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, invite you to participate in the fifth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The competition recognizes scientists, engineers, visualization specialists and artists for producing or commissioning innovative work in visual communication. The entry deadline is May 31.

Winners in each category will be published in the September 28, 2007 issue of Science and Science Online, and will be displayed on the NSF Web site.

IBM's Many Eyes

A number of people have been referencing this new work from IBM.  Looks like it could be an interesting way of learning more about your data.  Brian Dennis links up IBM VCL: Many Eyes

Following up on my admiration for their Communication-Minded Visualization manifesto, Martin Wattenberg , Fernanda Viégas, and the rest of their compatriots at IBM's Visual Communication Lab have launched Many Eyes. Many Eyes is the concrete manifestation of the themes in their manifesto:

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.

Information Visualization at PNNL

Coolness.  The Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) has a center for Information Visualization with several visualization technologies.  Some of them are available to specific customers (mostly the people who pay the bills at PNNL), or to some commercial enterprises.

Here is their description - InfoViz at PNNL:

PNNL has long been a world leader in visualization tools and research. Our many publications and the success of our software, such as IN-SPIRE™ and Starlight™, are the results of our dedication to helping people make sense of large volumes of data.

We have been deploying technologies for more than ten years in domains such as threat detection for national security, pharmaceutical development, energy grid security, environmental safety, training applications, and law enforcement. We are capitalizing on this experience to address the challenge of not only understanding the past and the present, but to gain insight into alternative potential futures.

MeshForum hosted collections of Network Data for researchers

MeshForum's mission is to foster research into Networks. One vital part of this mission is our annual MeshForum conferences and our monthly MeshWalk events. With this post I am announcing another way MeshForum will the community of researchers, companies and organizations who are working with and within Networks. MeshForum will be working with sponsoring companies to make large, real-world data sets available to researchers. These data sets will be drawn from a wide range of industries and types of networks, likewise the data is intended for researchers working in many fields and with a variety of tools and techniques for the analysis and study of Networks.

In the light of the ongoing complications around AOL's release of search data for researchers, a major aspect of MeshForum's service offering to sponsoring organizations and companies will be to work closely with the source of each data set to ensure that no personal data or propriatary information is released as part of the data collections, while also working to ensure that any necessary modifications to the data do not impact the network analysis of the data collection. In many cases this may mean that certain collections of data can not be released, or can only be released in forms suitable for some types of analysis (aggregate but not specific individuals for example).

MeshForum will seek to make these data collections as widely available as possible and will be working with all organizations and tools vendors to help define interoperable standards for the exchange of network data collections. We will work with other data repositories and research organizations. Our mission is to work in an open and interdisciplinary manner, so we will be seeking data collections from a very wide spectrum of types of networks - biological systems, transportation networks, supply chains, economic/business transactional records, data sets derived from social art projects, social network data collections and many more.

Data sets may also be of any size, though we will actively seek large, "real-world" scale data collections to make the largest and richest collections of network data available for research.

We will be exploring a variety of funding mechanisms for these data collections and related services. Our intent will be to balance the desire to make these data collections as widely available as possible, while covering the costs of collecting, storing, preserving, sharing and wherever possible updating these data collections. We will ask corporate providers of data to help cover many of the costs associated with their datasets. We will seek to make this data available both to academic institutions and corporate (or government) researchers equally.

If you are interested in working with MeshForum to make one or more collections of data available please contact us either via the contact us page on our website, via leaving a comment here, or by calling MeshForum at 1.800.454.4929.

If you are interested in researching networks and would be interested in any data sets we collect (or have specific types of data sets you would be interested in working with) please also contact us. We will add you to a mailing list for ongoing discussions, as well as to receive notifications as new data sets become available.

If you are a firm offering applications for studying or visualizing network data we are very interested in working closely with you to ensure that any data sets we collect that would be relevent to your users are made available in a format easily useable by your applications, either directly or through well documented (and ideally open source) translators.

Wireless mesh network in Cambridge

From Smart Mobs comes MIT and Cambridge, related to MIT and City Collaborate To Provide Free Wireless from MIT's The Tech online newspaper on Feb 1st.

This article says 'a collaboration with MIT researchers may provide Cambridge with a free,city-wide,wireless internet service as early as late summer. The project will rely on a mesh networking technology that allows individual computers to become new access points, projecting the reach of the network beyond its original antennas. ...

VisualComplexity - visualization resource

From the MindJet Blog, a pointer to Visual Complexity

VisualComplexity - A unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks…across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

Tim found it on Emily Changs’s e-hub.

Book chapter: Software for Social Network Analysis

Impressive review of Social Network Analysis software. Software for Social Network Analysis by Mark Huisman and Marijtje A.J. van Duijn.

Abstract: This chapter gives a state-of-the art overview of available (free and commercial) software for social network analysis as of fall 2003. It reviews and compares six programs, illustrating their functionality with example data. Data manipulation options and available support are also discussed. Furthermore, seventeen other, of which nine special-purpose, software packages and five software routine packages for general statistical software are reviewed briefly. The chapter concludes with some recommendations.

SNA Tools Discussion

From Patti Anklam and Joseph Hutchinson's organization, comes a discussion of SNA Tools

Tools for SNA are best learnt through formal training or some form of apprenticeship or mentoring. The tools are not designed for novices; they assume some sort of prior training in the sociological and mathematical aspects of networks. Generally, the tools are taught in the context of a university course: either a graduate program (there are over a dozen universities, worldwide, that offer graduate courses in social networks), or (increasingly) in organizational development courses or in business schools.

Jabberwokky article

TheFeature :: Intel: Keeping Tabs on Your Slithy Toves

Mark Frauenfelder, one of the contributers to BoingBoing has written a short article on Jabberwokkey. A Bluetooth application from Intel which uses Bluetooth enabled cell phones to track "familiar strangers".

A familiar stranger is someone you see frequently but do not know personally, such as the people who take the same bus or train as you each morning, or the other regulars at your favorite café.

empyrean, a virtual network

empyrean is a parrallel universe, an etheric arena beyond space and time - the hungry void of potentiality. it is the place of emptiness where all things are possible, the realm of the spirit, embracing the folds of the soul.