Research

Benjamin is a Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization at the University of Edinburgh. His research designs and investigates interactive information visualization interfaces to help people explore, communicate, and understand data.

Research interests:

• Network Visualization
• Visualization of spatio-temporal data
• Data-driven storytelling
• Visualization in Augmented and Virtual Reality (Immersive Analytics)
• Non-digital visualization
• Teaching and learning visualization

Before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2017, Benjamin worked as a postdoc at Harvard University (Visual Computing Group), Monash University, as well as the Microsoft-Research Inria Joint Centre. Benjamin was visiting researcher at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research in 2015. He obtained his PhD in 2014 from the Université Paris Sud where he worked at the Aviz Group at Inria. The PhD thesis entitled Connections, Changes, and Cubes: Unfolding Dynamic Networks for Visual Exploration got awarded an honorable mention as the Best Thesis by the IEEE Visualization Committee.

News

• Publications
• Supervision and Openings (PhD, MSc, MA)


• Bio
• Professional
• Demos and Websites


• Teaching
• Supervision

Publications

Theses

• Connections, Change, and Cubes: Unfolding Dynamic Networks for Visual Exploration, PhD Thesis, Université Paris-Sud, 2014
• Facettice: Integrating Faceted Navigation and Conceptn Lattices for Visual Data Exploration, Diploma Thesis, University of Technology Dresden, 2010

Teaching

Current:

September 2017 - Data Science for Designers, University of Edinburgh

Past:

December 2014 - Interactive Information Visualization

Fall 2007 — Didactics and Media Psycholoy (TA)

Fall 2006 — Didactics and Media Psycholoy (TA)

Open Topics (PhD, MSc MA)

I permanently look for talented, motivated, and creative PhD and Master students (MSc, MA) in any of my research topics. Contact me with an abstract or full proposal. Some of the topics I am keen to explore are listed below, others are found here: http://web.inf.ed.ac.uk/ilcc/study-with-us/possible-phd-topics-ilcc/information-visualisation.

To help figuring out if I can help you, read about the projects in visualization.

For oversea students, the University of Edinburgh has regular special funding: https://www.ed.ac.uk/student-funding. Edinburgh University is one of the top universities in the UK. According to the Times Higher Education ranking, the School of Informatics has been ranked #14 world-wide. Edinburgh and the University is a largely interdisciplinary campus, with a huge potential for interdisciplinary collaborations into biology, the social sciences, digital humanities, illustration, product and graphic design, design informatics, as well as within the School of Informatics for machine learning, NLP, and learning analytics. About the city itself, best is to ask me directly and I reply in a personal email. In a nutshell: Edinburgh is a very international, cultural, very livable and attractive city with a 1.5h drive to the gorgeous highlands. It's not raining as much as people like to tell.

• Collaborative Network Visualization (PhD)
• Data-driven Storytelling for Visualization
• Designing Data Visualizations for Augmented Reality
• Interaction with Augmented Reality Holograms
• Interactive Visualizations Augmented Reality
• Visualizing Graph Databases
• Tools for Network Visualization
• Interactive and Tangible Paper Visualizations
• Non-digital forms of visualization
• Teaching visualization beyond the classroom

Brief Bio

Professional

Reviewing

Supervision

• Qiuyuan Ren (Master by Research, 2018)
• Finn Ickler (MSc, 2018)
• Xudong Jiang (MSc, 2018)
• Ilyas Zholdasbayev (MSc, 2018)
• Alexander Olson (B.Hons, 2018)
• Veronika Dimitrova (B.Hons, 2018)
• Yiwei Sun (MSc, 2018)
• Yan Wu (MSc, 2018)
• Iqbal Rosiadi (MSc, 2018)
• Edson Alcala (MSc, 2017)
• Parul Sharma (MSc dissertation, 2017)
• Ruobing Hao (MA, 2017)
• Xian Tang (MSc, 2017)
• Zezhong Wang (MSc, 2017)

Demos and Websites