Evanthia Dimara

Date: 16:00 – 17:00, Thursday, 27.01.2022
Location: MS Teams ICS Colloquium

Title: Opportunities and Challenges for Data Visualization to Support  Decision Making
Abstract: How can organizations cultivate a culture in which decisions are based on complex data and scientific evidence, if the current most accessible tools that decision makers use are a paper, a pencil and a spreadsheet? Unaided by technology, human intuition is overloaded with data or hindered by systematic biases. Fully automated technology, such as state‐of‐the‐art Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, is not yet suitable for ill‐defined problems. Somewhere in between is Information Visualization (Infovis), a field that studies the design of effective data interfaces which keep the user in control of the reasoning process while helping them deal with ill‐defined problems.   Yet, despite the rich variety of visual analytics software,  real‐world decision makers have not fully exploited the benefits of visualizations. Possible explanations for their lack of adoption can be that decision makers are not data literate or simply not aware of more powerful existing solutions. An alternative explanation could be that visualizations are simply not well-designed to facilitate the creative act of decision making. This presentation leverages the second explanation by identifying challenges and opportunities for novel visualization tools.  Our findings from an empirical survey and interviews with people who make organizational decisions stress the need to expand visualization design beyond data analysis objectives into tools for information management. The related publications are openly available here http://evanthiadimara.com/publications.