Last month, the international visualization community met in Bangkok, Thailand to discuss latest research results. IEEE PacificVis is one of the three important international conferences on visualization research. Around 120 participants from all over the world attended the event and presented a wide variety of visualization projects. The trending topic were visualizations for explaining machine learning and artificial intelligence. A German contribution from University of Konstanz and University of Stuttgart won the best paper award for an approach to enhance scatterplots for large datasets. Talks from practitioners provided visualization frameworks being used in their industry and demonstrated the high practical relevance of visualization research. 

Our group actively contributed to the conference. Shahid Latif presented our work as part of the PacificVast track. We aimed at making the results geographical data analysis easier to understand. Our web-based tool Interactive Map Reports automatically generates a textual narrative along with a map visualization. The generated narrative highlights the core patterns in the data are otherwise be hard to detect by means of visual representation alone. More details about this work can be found in our paper.

Fabian Beck supported the conference in his role as Visualization Notes Co-Chair, supervising the review process of the short papers. For PacificVis 2020, he will serve as Papers Co-Chair and be responsible for the selection of the main scientific program of the conference.