Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Comparative Visual Cues for Transparent Diagnostics of Competing Models

PRIVEE: A Visual Analytic Workflow for Proactive Privacy Risk Inspection of Open Data

Open data sets that contain personal information are susceptible to adversarial attacks even when anonymized. By performing low-cost joins on multiple datasets with shared attributes, malicious users of open data portals might get access to information that violates individuals' privacy. However, open data sets are primarily published using a release-and-forget model, whereby data owners and custodians have little to no cognizance of these privacy risks. We address this critical gap by developing a visual analytic solution that enables data defenders to gain awareness about the disclosure risks in local, joinable data neighborhoods. The solution is derived through a design study with data privacy researchers, where we initially play the role of a red team and engage in an ethical data hacking exercise based on privacy attack scenarios. We use this problem and domain characterization to develop a set of visual analytic interventions as a defense mechanism and realize them in PRIVEE, a visual risk inspection workflow that acts as a proactive monitor for data defenders. PRIVEE uses a combination of risk scores and associated interactive visualizations to let data defenders explore vulnerable joins and interpret risks at multiple levels of data granularity. We demonstrate how PRIVEE can help emulate the attack strategies and diagnose disclosure risks through two case studies with data privacy experts.

A Probability Density-Based Visual Analytics Approach to Forecast Bias Calibration

Biases inevitably occur in numerical weather prediction (NWP) due to an idealized numerical assumption for modeling chaotic atmospheric systems. Therefore, the rapid and accurate identification and calibration of biases is crucial for NWP in weather forecasting. Conventional approaches, such as various analog post-processing forecast methods, have been designed to aid in bias calibration. However, these approaches fail to consider the spatiotemporal correlations of forecast bias, which can considerably affect calibration efficacy. In this article, we propose a novel bias pattern extraction approach based on forecasting-observation probability density by merging historical forecasting and observation datasets. Given a spatiotemporal scope, our approach extracts and fuses bias patterns and automatically divides regions with similar bias patterns. Termed BicaVis, our spatiotemporal bias pattern visual analytics system is proposed to assist experts in drafting calibration curves on the basis of these bias patterns. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct two case studies with real-world reanalysis datasets. The feedback collected from domain experts confirms the efficacy of our approach.

A Taxonomy of Property Measures to Unify Active Learning and Human-centered Approaches to Data Labeling

Strategies for selecting the next data instance to label, in service of generating labeled data for machine learning, have been considered separately in the machine learning literature on active learning and in the visual analytics literature on human-centered approaches. We propose a unified design space for instance selection strategies to support detailed and fine-grained analysis covering both of these perspectives. We identify a concise set of 15 properties, namely measureable characteristics of datasets or of machine learning models applied to them, that cover most of the strategies in these literatures. To quantify these properties, we introduce Property Measures (PM) as fine-grained building blocks that can be used to formalize instance selection strategies. In addition, we present a taxonomy of PMs to support the description, evaluation, and generation of PMs across four dimensions: machine learning (ML) Model Output , Instance Relations , Measure Functionality , and Measure Valence . We also create computational infrastructure to support qualitative visual data analysis: a visual analytics explainer for PMs built around an implementation of PMs using cascades of eight atomic functions. It supports eight analysis tasks, covering the analysis of datasets and ML models using visual comparison within and between PMs and groups of PMs, and over time during the interactive labeling process. We iteratively refined the PM taxonomy, the explainer, and the task abstraction in parallel with each other during a two-year formative process, and show evidence of their utility through a summative evaluation with the same infrastructure. This research builds a formal baseline for the better understanding of the commonalities and differences of instance selection strategies, which can serve as the stepping stone for the synthesis of novel strategies in future work.

VIS30K: A Collection of Figures and Tables From IEEE Visualization Conference Publications

We present the VIS30K dataset, a collection of 29,689 images that represents 30 years of figures and tables from each track of the IEEE Visualization conference series (Vis, SciVis, InfoVis, VAST). VIS30K's comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature in visualization not only reflects the progress of the field but also enables researchers to study the evolution of the state-of-the-art and to find relevant work based on graphical content. We describe the dataset and our semi-automatic collection process, which couples convolutional neural networks (CNN) with curation. Extracting figures and tables semi-automatically allows us to verify that no images are overlooked or extracted erroneously. To improve quality further, we engaged in a peer-search process for high-quality figures from early IEEE Visualization papers. With the resulting data, we also contribute VISImageNavigator (VIN, visimagenavigator.github.io), a web-based tool that facilitates searching and exploring VIS30K by author names, paper keywords, title and abstract, and years.

Adoption of green IT in Pakistan: a comparison of three competing models through model selection criteria using PLS-SEM

The growing adverse impact of IT products in developing countries like Pakistan is increasing, seeking academicians' and practitioners' attention to adopt green IT products in Pakistan. In this regard, several researchers provided different independent theoretical models for adopting green IT, but which model fits best in the scenario is still vague. Therefore, this study used three well-developed competing models: the technology acceptance model, the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, and the decomposed theory of planned behavior to investigate green IT adoption in Pakistan. For this purpose, data were collected through a survey method using a purposive sampling technique, and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze three competing models. Using the PLS model selection criteria along with standard model selection criteria, the results suggested that the decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB) is the most parsimonious and has the best explanatory and predictive power than other available alternative theoretical models. Moreover, the study identified different significant factors affecting consumers' intention to adopt green IT products in Pakistan. The theoretical and practical implication of this study is discussed. In the final section, limitations and future directions are elaborated.