Research | MSState Faculty

Games and Visual Environment Lab (GaVEL)

Data is everywhere, but without a means to understand it, data is fundamentally useless. One avenue to make data meaningful is the use of visualization—interactive computer graphics for visually analyzing information. My expertise is in both spatial/scientific visualization (visualization of 3D structures) and non-spatial/information visualization (visualization of abstract data). I work with data stakeholders on their tasks while at the same time delving the limits of visualization. Toward these ends, I focus on visualization theory, interactive visual analytics, and applications such as bioinformatics and security visualization. Fundamentally, I help others solve their problems.

Recently, I have also begun to investigate how board & computer gamers use visualizations to improve their gameplay and how visualization can be used in to understand gameplay. This continues work in communicating sport via visualization and explaining how visualization is used during gameplay.

Visualization in Games & Sport

How can we visually summarize how the Dawg's did in their last football game? What is game developer using visualization for and why? These are types of question answered by Game & Sport Visualization.

Gaming (computer-based or otherwise) and Sport occupy a significant part of the economy and personal past-times. As such, they are entities worth of study. In this work, we look how visualization is currently being used by developers, broadcasters, and participants and how we can use visualization to assist and understand these audiences.

Visual Data Science & Analytics

Interactive visualization assist both the understanding of data and provides power methods to explore and analyze it. It is a core part of Data Science.

Our work applies visualization to novel domains that integrate both scientific and information visualization. We have worked with police officers and hurricane scientists to assist them with analytic tools. We have also contributed visual methods for bioinformatics, computer security, and liquid crystal physics (and more!)

Visualization Theory

As a human activity, visualization itself can be studied. We study how users interact and explore data via visualization.

In our initial work, we formulated the fundamental operation in visualization. Building upon this, we formulated models to capture visualization provenance and analyze the process. We continue looking how users use visualization in different settings.