Abstract:
Exploring data requires a short feedback loop, with a latency of at most 10 seconds because of human cognitive capabilities and limitations. When data becomes large or analysis becomes complex, sequential computations can no longer be completed in a few seconds and interactive exploration is severely hampered. This talk will describe a novel programming paradigm called Progressive Analytics that brings at the programming language level the low-latency guarantee by performing computations in a progressive fashion. Moving this progressive computation at the language level relieves the programmer of exploratory analytics systems — including visual analytics — from implementing the whole analytics pipeline in a progressive way from scratch, streamlining the implementation of scalable exploratory analytics systems. I will describe the new paradigm through demos using a prototype implementation called ProgressiVis, explain the requirements it implies through exemplar applications, and present opportunities and challenges ahead.

Bio:
Jean-Daniel Fekete is Senior Research Scientist (DR1) at Inria, the French National Research Institute in Computer Science. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1996 from Université Paris-Sud. From 1997 to 2001, he joined the Graphic Design group at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes that he led from 2000 to 2001. He was then invited to join the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland in the USA for one year. He was recruited by Inria in 2002 as a confirmed researcher and became Senior Research Scientist in 2006. He is the Scientific Leader of the Inria Project Team AVIZ that he founded in 2007 and that is well known worldwide in the domains of visualization and human-computer interaction. His main research areas are Visual Analytics, Information Visualization and Human Computer Interaction. He was the General Chair of the IEEE VIS Conference in 2014, the first time it was held outside of the USA in Paris. He is a member of the IEEE Information Visualization Conference Steering Committee and of the EG EuroVis Steering Committee.