We have teamed up with Minnesota Public Radio to create the Minnesota Employment Explorer: a collaborative visualization for people to explore recent employment trends and share their questions and insights. It's part of a larger piece on the recent economic slowdown. Come explore the data and share your findings!

And if you see something you like, you can embed the charts in your own blog...

The IBM Visual Communication Lab is using prefuse flare (an open source visualization toolkit built here at the VisLab) to create visualizations for the Many-Eyes visualization service. Check out their new Comparison Tag Clouds, made with Flare!

We are teaching CS160:User Interfaces again this spring. Please visit the course wiki for more information.

We're happy to announce the first alpha release of prefuse flare, a new visualization toolkit for Flash written in ActionScript 3. Flare is part of our ongoing research efforts to weave data visualizations into the web.

We are teaching CS294-10:Visualization again in fall 2007. More information is on the course wiki.

We will be offering CS160:User Interfaces for the fall semester 2006. For more information check out the course wiki.

Please join us on Friday May 12 from 1:00-4:30pm in Soda 306 for a mini-workshop on recent research in Visualization techniques.

Visualizations are displays that are designed to convey information. They capitalize on human facilities for processing visual information and when well designed they can improve comprehension, memory, inference, and decision making. Yet, designing visualizations remains a difficult and time-consuming task. Research on visualization techniques is aimed at developing principles, algorithms and methodologies that will make it easier to produce effective visual displays.

Please see http://vis.berkeley.edu/workshop-0512 for more details.

A poster session for CS294-10: Visualization will be held Thursday May 11, from 1 PM to 3:30 PM in the Berkeley Institute of Design (354 Hearst Memorial Mining Building). Food and drink will be provided.

The presented projects include visualization systems for a wide array of topics. Examples include maps, high-dynamic range photography, Internet security, visualization of probabilistic data, animation and shape databases, music/audio visualization, zoomable user interfaces, and visualization of online dating compatibility.

In addition, we've invited a number of prominent visualization researchers to judge student projects and award prizes.

More information on the Visualization course is available at http://vis.berkeley.edu/cs294-10-sp06.

For directions to the Berkeley Institute of Design, please see http://bid.berkeley.edu/directions.html.

The prefuse visualization toolkit, our open-source software framework for authoring information visualization applications, has just surpassed 10,000 downloads! Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the toolkit along the way.

For more information about the toolkit, including a gallery of sample applications, see the prefuse homepage.

The Vizster system for visualizing online social networks was featured on the CBS crime drama Numb3rs. The show is about an FBI agent and his brother, a professor that uses various mathematical and algorithmic techniques to solve crimes. In the March 3, 2006 episode "Protest", social network analysis is used to "catch the bad guy". The Vizster visualization is used to illustrate the concept of social networks. Though listed in the end credits, Jeff and danah are not considering a move to Hollywood at this time.

You can also download the clip (WMV, 4.7M).