Diagrams 2010

Two tutorials will be offered at Diagrams 2010: 1) Drawing Euler Diagrams for Information Visualization, and 2) Diagrams: A Perspective from Logic. Participation in these tutorials is included in the basic registration fee.

Drawing Euler Diagrams for Information Visualization
The automated generation and layout of diagrams is key to the usability of visual languages. The techniques explained in this tutorial enable the automated generation and layout of Euler diagrams, as well as the enhancement of the layout of manually drawn diagrams.

Participants will be presented with an overview of different Euler diagram drawing methods, including their strengths and weaknesses. Various freely available software tools to support their use will be demonstrated. The tutorial will also discuss their use in information visualization, highlighting a range of areas in which they are helpful. Thus, the tutorial should make attendees more aware of the scope for Euler diagram application and the state-of-the-art tools available for their automated generation.

Details of the tutorial, including slides and links to software
can be found at
http://www.eulerdiagrams.com/diagrams2010Tutorial.html.

The Presenters

• Prof. John Howse is Professor of Mathematics and Computation at the University of Brighton, UK, where he is leader of the Visual Modelling Research Group. His main research interests are diagrammatic reasoning, the development of visual modelling languages and automated diagram drawing. He is on the program committee for several international conferences, was General Chair of Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing 2006, is on the steering committee for the Diagrams conference series and was Program Chair for Diagrams 2008. He received the Best Paper Award at Diagrams 2002, as co-author of the first paper on automated Euler diagram drawing. He is the Principal Investigator on the Visualization with Euler Diagrams project, at the Brighton site, which is developing advanced techniques to automate the Euler diagram drawing process.
• Dr. Peter Rodgers is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Kent, UK. He has been teaching graph algorithms and diagram drawing at undergraduate and postgraduate level for over ten years. He has been an author on over 30 peer reviewed publications in diagram visualization and algorithms. These papers include descriptions of work on extending force directed layout and improving the performance of graph layout algorithms. They also detail his research in Euler diagram visualization, such as the first aesthetics based visualization method for Euler diagrams, and producing the first empirical study on the usability of Euler diagrams. He chaired the first Euler diagrams workshop in 2004 and is the Principal Investigator on Visualization with Euler Diagrams at the Kent site.
• Dr. Gem Stapleton is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Brighton, UK. She has been teaching undergraduate level mathematics and computing subjects since 2001, including relevant topics such as graph theory and diagrammatic reasoning. Her research interests encompass diagrammatic logics, with an emphasis on those based on Euler diagrams. Dr Stapleton’s research on automated theorem proving is a particular application area where automated diagram layout is necessary. She has around 50 publications in the visual languages area and has received various awards for her research. She served on various Program Committees in the area of visual languages, was General Chair of Diagrams 2008 and is a Co-Investigator on Visualization with Euler Diagrams.

Diagrams: A Perspective from Logic
The major goals of this two-hour tutorial are to introduce and explain the techniques used by logicians to analyze reasoning with diagrammatic representations. The tutorial will proceed by first recapitulating the standard sentence-based approach to modelling reasoning, and then give a detailed presentation of the Hyperproof reasoning system. Hyperproof is a formal reasoning system, implemented as a computer application, for heterogeneous reasoning with diagrams and sentences.

The tutorial will be a mixture of lecture and workshop. Attendees will each receive a full copy of the Hyperproof program, and will be able to use this to follow along with examples on their individual laptops if they desire.

Attendees will gain a understanding of the questions asked by logicians when analyzing the properties of diagrammatic representations and the techniques used to reason with them. The three main questions concern: expressive completeness -- the degree to which diagrams can be used to represent information about a given domain; soundness of inference -- how we can guarantee the validity of conclusions reached by reasoning with diagrams, and completeness of inference -- the range of conclusions that can be reached by using those techniques.

The Presenter

Dave Barker-Plummer is a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University. Since 1995 he has managed the Openproof project's work on educational software for teaching logic at the undergraduate level, including the development of the Hyperproof program for formal heterogeneous reasoning.

He is the author of papers on automated reasoning, reasoning with diagrams, and architectures for heterogeneous reasoning. He co-edited the collection Words, Proofs and Diagrams, and was General Chair of the Diagrams 2006 conference.

Dave has taught computer science and logic at Stanford, Swarthmore College and Duke University.