Diving into Big Data: Human-Data Interaction Showcase

Explore data visualization at the Human-Data Interaction Showcase from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday, May 1 in the Grand Lobby of the Harold Washington Library Center.

As "big data" becomes more and more a part of everyday life, we see many institutions, like the U.S. Census Bureau, the NBA, the U.S. Geological Survey and even cities like Chicago, making large data sets available to the public. But just because data is available doesn't mean it's accessible or easy to understand. How data can be visualized and made engaging through human-computer interaction design is an open challenge.

At the showcase, students from the University of Illinois at Chicago will present the human-data interaction projects they created for the Computer Science Department's User Interface Design & Programming course taught by Dr. Leilah Lyons. Students were given the challenge of selecting a data set and designing a whole-body interaction experience using a Microsoft Kinect camera to make the data set explorable. Come and see what the students put together, and vote for the application that you think did the best job of making a large data set engaging.