From 8 July until 12 July, Lisa Koeman attended the SICSA Big Data Information Visualisation summer school at the University of St Andrews. The week was aimed specifically at PhD students, and just over 30 applications were selected. The attendees came from a number of countries and had a variety of backgrounds, including human-computer interaction and statistics.

The summer school had an initial focus on theory, with an increasing amount of practical work. The theoretical part consisted of talks by Professor Peter Triantafillou (University of Glasgow), Professor John Stasko (Georgia Tech) and Professor Sheelagh Carpendale (University of Calgary), among many others.

Not only were practical topics covered, including introductions to Hadoop and various visualisation tools, but also a more general background on small, medium and big data, programming models, network visualisation and interaction.

All attendees were assigned to groups, based on their interest in the different available datasets – which included Skyscraper flight data, UK migration data, the Enron mail corpus and various others. After a short introduction to the data, a sketching session was organised by Professor Sheelagh Carpendale, to allow each group to explore different methods of visualising.

The remaining part of the week was spent on the implementation of the visualisation ideas and final presentations were given to a jury on the last day of the summer school. The consensus among the attendees seemed to be that the week had been very intensive, but more importantly: very productive. A valuable experience, of great relevance to the work done on data analysis and visualisation by us at the ICRI Cities.

(Photo by Professor Aaron Quigley)