Welcome to VIS 2014 in Paris! The VIS acronym represents the three main conferences appearing this week: IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis), and the IEEE Scientific Visualization (SciVis). All the conferences now run single track in parallel from Tuesday to Friday. Additionally, VIS is hosting the IEEE Symposium on Large-Scale Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) on Sunday and Monday, as well as a diverse program of workshops and tutorials at which you can learn about and develop skills in the latest in VIS and contribute to VIS research efforts and agendas. This year, VIS celebrates its 25th anniversary with several special events in addition to its standard program. Scattered throughout the week, you will also be able to explore the Arts Program, Exhibit on Jacques Bertin, Doctoral Colloquium, and a series of panels, posters, Meetups (previously known as birds-of-a-feather—BOF), exhibitions, and a practitioner experiences track. It definitively promises to be an exciting and stimulating week!
We continue the recent tradition in which topical papers published during the last year in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) are presented during the conference. The presentations are now merged with the main conference sessions according to the topic of the papers and not as separate sessions. TVCG will publish all of the papers from InfoVis and SciVis, and 35 papers from VAST in a special December 2014 issue of the journal. In addition, this year, 21 VAST papers are presented at the conference level, so as to increase the opportunity for presenting emerging work, results, and applications of Visual Analytics.
This year, VIS features 8 workshops, 10 tutorials, and 6 panels, and roughly 150 posters overall. The opening session for the three conferences on Tuesday features keynote speaker Alberto Cairo – author of ‘The Functional Art’ and director of the Visualization Program at University of Miami Center for Computational Science; the closing session on Friday features capstone speaker Barbara Tversky – Professor of Psychology Emerita at Stanford University and Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College. Each conference day begins with a fast-forward session containing a brief 30-second preview of every paper to be presented during that day.
As always, a number of other events will enrich the week. Posters from all of the conferences will be on display and video previews of work presented during the conference will be viewable on special displays. Wednesday evening will feature a special poster viewing event and a VIS reception. The numerous breaks, various Compass lunch events to support the next generation of visualization researchers by helping connect beginning and advanced researchers, and evenings in the lobby will provide many further opportunities for social and collaborative interaction.
Welcome to Paris, thank you for coming, and have a great VIS!
Jean-Daniel Fekete, INRIA
VIS 2014 General Chair
Giuseppe Santucci, (VAST) Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”
Jason Dykes, (InfoVis) City University London
David Laidlaw, (SciVis) Brown University
Chuck Hansen, (LDAV) University of Utah
Thierry Carrard, (LDAV) CEA
VIS 2014 Conference & Symposium Chairs