When Do Decision Makers Use Visualisation?

Visualisation is a technique that visually represents vast amounts of data.

Speaker:Dr Mai Elshehaly, City, University of London

Visualisation is the graphical representation of data that offers audiences a qualitative understanding of information. It enables humans to make sense of large amounts of data and generate new insights about the past, present and future. However, there remains a well-documented gap between this insight generation process and the real-world practice of making decisions. In this talk, I will highlight some of the gaps in our data-centric view of visualisation. I will explain how narrative-focused visualisation can create new opportunities, not just to entertain and inform, but to direct the attention of decision makers to situations that are otherwise hidden or reduced to abstractions that poorly reflect the lived experiences of those represented in data.

Dr. Mai Elshehaly is a Lecturer in Visualisation at the giCentre at City, University of London.

Mai designs, develops and evaluates visual analytics workflows to support decision-making. An Honorary Research Fellow at the Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, Mai leads the visualisation research agenda at the Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Centre. She works closely with colleagues at local authorities and several partner organisations to deliver data literacy to over 30,000 young citizens in Bradford. Mai received a PhD in Computer Science from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech, with a focus on scientific data visualisation. Her postdoctoral research experience included NSF- and NIHR-funded fellowships at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and University of Leeds.

Moderator: Dr Federico Colecchia (Lecturer in n Creative Electronics and Programming, Brunel University London)