Trajectory Analytics Project

Tutorial on Urban Trajectory Data Visualization (IEEE VIS 2018 Conference)


Our team gave a tutorial on Urban Trajectory Data Visualization and showed our software (TrajAnalytics) as an example in the IEEE VIS 2018, the worldwide largest and most important conference on Scientific Visualization, Information Visualization, and Visual Analytics. The conference held 21-26 October 2018 in Berlin, Germany.


Tutorial Organizers and Presenters:

  • Ye Zhao (Kent State University, USA)
  • Wei Chen (Zhejiang University, China)
  • Jing Yang (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)
  • Shamal AL-Dohuki (Kent State University, USA)
  • Zhaosong Huang (Zhejiang University, China, USA)
  • Farah Kamw (Kent State University, USA)

Abstract:

Advanced sensing technologies and computing infrastructures are producing massive trajectory data of people and vehicles in urban spaces at an unprecedented scale and speed. With the prevalent GPS, Wi-Fi, Cellular, and RFID devices, population mobility information is accurately recorded as the moving paths of taxis, fleets, public transits, and mobile phones. The information can be utilized in the studies of urban systems, environment, economy, and citizens to optimize urban planning, improve human life quality and environment, and amend city operations.
Nowadays, a large amount of trajectory datasets are collected by a variety of practitioners, such as transportation administrations, taxi companies, bike sharing companies, fleets, mobile service providers, and other relevant researchers. Some of the datasets are available for public use in research, while more trajectory datasets are not publicized but used by researchers in their studies and publications including taxis, mobile phone and wife users’ traces, public transits, human paths, etc. In the long run, we will see more and more trajectory data with the widespread use of trajectory recording devices and systems.
To extract profound insights from the data, domain users must conduct iterative, evolving information foraging and sense making and guide the process using their domain knowledge. Iterative visual exploration is one key component in the processing, which should be supported by efficient data management and visualization tools. Visual analytics techniques and systems are demanded to support effective visual analytics, which integrates scalable data management and interactive visualization with powerful computational capabilities.
In this tutorial, our major goal is to help visualization researchers and practitioners in the development of visualization systems of big trajectory datasets. Our tutorial contents will focus on important and practical topics people usually face when developing a visualization system of urban trajectories including:

  • Trajectory data representation, processing, indexing, and data queries.
  • Trajectory data visualization tasks, challenges, and techniques.
  • Developing interactive visualization system.
  • Case studies of urban visual analytics with shared source codes and examples.

We expect the audience of the tutorial not only gain knowledge about the visualization of urban trajectory data but also achieve experiences in implementing real-world visualization systems. The presenters of this tutorial have conducted extensive research on developing trajectory data visualization systems and applying them in various visual analytics applications, which involve multiple types of the urban trajectory datasets. We have acquired a lot of knowledge, experience, and fun. Meanwhile, we expect rapidly increasing demand and impact of the visualization techniques and tools from domain users and stakeholders, to fully utilize the important types of urban datasets in more and more scenarios. We hope to share the enthusiasm with the audience as much as possible.


Our team talks can be downloaded below: