PhD defense of Wael Khemiri

“Data-intensive interactive workflows for visual analytics”

Room 455, PCRI, 2 pm, December 12, 2011

The increasing amounts of electronic data of all forms, produced by humans (e.g. Web pages, structured content such as Wikipedia or the blogosphere etc.) and/or automatic tools (loggers, sensors, Web services, scientific programs or analysis tools etc.) leads to a situation of unprecedented potential for extracting new knowledge, finding new correlations, or simply  making sense of the data.

Visual analytics aims at combining interactive data visualization with data analysis tasks. Given the explosion in volume and complexity of scientific data, e.g., associated to biological or physical processes or social networks, visual analytics is called to play an important role in scientific data management.

Most visual analytics platforms, however, are memory-based, and are therefore limited in the volume of data handled. Moreover, the integration of each new algorithm (e.g. for clustering) requires integrating it by hand into the platform. Finally, they lack the capability to define and deploy well-structured processes where users with different roles interact in a coordinated way sharing the same data and possibly the same visualizations.

This work is at the convergence of three research areas: information visualization, database query processing and optimization, and workflow modeling. It provides two main contributions: (i) We propose a generic architecture for deploying a visual analytics platform on top of a database management system (DBMS) (ii) We show how to propagate data changes to the DBMS and visualizations, through the workflow process. Our approach has been implemented in a prototype called EdiFlow, and validated through several applications.  It clearly demonstrates that visual analytics applications can benefit from robust storage and automatic process deployment provided by the DBMS while obtaining good performance and thus it provides scalability. Conversely, it could also be integrated into a data-intensive scientific workflow platform in order to increase its visualization features.

Key-words: Visual analytics, scientific workflow systems, dynamic changes.

Permanent link to this article: https://team.inria.fr/oak/2011/12/12/phd-defense-of-wael-khemiri/