Fuller Laboratories, 231
Matthew Oliver Ward
- Professor, Computer Science
- Affiliated with:
- Director, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
I do research and teach in an area loosely termed “Image Sciences,” which includes topics such as computer graphics, animation, image processing, computer vision, and data and information visualization. It is this last topic that has made up the thrust of my main research over the past 20 years.
Visualization concerns the graphical depiction of data and information in order to communicate its contents and reveal patterns. As such, it is sometimes referred to as visual data mining, or visual analytics. Given an arbitrary collection of data/information from a database, spreadsheet, collection of documents, or pretty much any other data source, how does one extract patterns and meaning from it? I have worked with researchers in many domains to help them understand their data, from bioinformatics to finance, to engineering and science. Basically, anyone with experimental data, surveys, simulations, or computational models needs to develop a mental model of what is contained, and that is what I enjoy working on.
It is always exciting to work with others, whether it be faculty, domain experts, or students, to see their data/information in new ways, to uncover new patterns or trends, and help them understand their data in a way that is much richer than the results of statistical or computational analysis.
- Information Visualization
- Visual Analytics
- BS, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1977
- MS, University of Connecticut, 1979
- Ph.D., University of Connecticut, 1981
- M. Ward, G. Grinstein, and D. Keim, Interactive Data Visualization: Foundations, Techniques, and Applications, AK Peters Publishers, 2010/li>
- Matthew O. Ward and Zhenyu Guo, "Visual Exploration of Time-Series Data with Shape Space Projections", Computer Graphics Forum 2011, Volume 30, Number 3, pp 701-710./li>
- Zhenyu Guo and Matthew O. Ward and Elke A. Rundensteiner and Carolina Ruiz, "Pointwise Local Pattern Exploration for Sensitivity Analysis", IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology 2011, pp 129-138.
- Zhenyu Guo, Matthew O. Ward, Elke A. Rundensteiner, "Model Space Visualization for Multivariate Linear Trend Discovery", IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, pp 75-82, October 2009.
- Keynote Speaker, European Visualization Conference, 2010