4 activities of interest related to the VISUAL ANALYTICS EVALUATION 1) CALL FOR PAPERS - Computer Graphics and Applications SPECIAL ISSUE (see details below) SUBMIT by September 12th. 2) NEW RESOURCE on Visual Analytics Evaluation: SEMVAST http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/semvast/ JOIN our mailing list, CHECK our wiki listing workshops (e.g. Beliv'08) and other activities 3) VAST CHALLENGE 2008 announced as a participation category of the VisWeek 08 and the VAST symposium http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/VASTchallenge08/ now with mini-challenges. PARTICIPATE, TEST your tools! 4) PAPER summurizing the findings of the VAST 2007 contest just appeared in March issue of CG&A http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_cga/cga/homepage/2008/cg20080200 12.pdf Read about the benefits of the contest to participants and our community Catherine Plaisant HCIL, University of Maryland Special Issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A) on Visual Analytics Evaluation 1st Call for Papers Guest Editors: Catherine Plaisant, Georges Grinstein and Jean Scholtz Submissions Due: September 12, 2008 Author Notification: December 15, 2009 Final Versions Due: January 30, 2009 Publication: May/June 2009 Issue of IEEE CG&A Visual analytics (VA) is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. Assessing the effectiveness of visual analytics technology is challenging because VA tools often combine several disparate components, both low and high level, integrated in complex interactive systems used by analysts. These components include analytical reasoning, visual representations, computer human interactions, data representations and algorithms, tools for collaboration and especially for communicating the results of their usage. Users' activities can be exploratory and can take place over days, weeks or months. Users may not follow a predefined or even linear work flow. Users may work alone or in groups. To understand these complex behaviors, evaluation efforts can be targeted at the component level, the system level, and the work environment level, and require realistic data and tasks. Traditional evaluation metrics such as task time completion, number of errors, or recall and precision are insufficient to quantify the utility of visual analytics tools, and new research is needed to improve our visual analytics evaluation methodology. We invite submissions in all areas related to the Evaluation of Visual Analytics. Topics include, but are not limited to * Evaluation metrics and tools * Insight characterization and measures * Benchmark task and data set development * Methodology of longitudinal case studies * Characterization of the challenges of VA evaluation * Survey of existing VA evaluation methodologies * Lessons learned from specific evaluation activities * Automation of evaluation * Synthetic data set generation and usage Articles should be no more than 10 magazine pages, where a page is 750 words and an image counts as 200 words. Citations should consist of the 12 most relevant references. Background can be provided for non-expert readers in sidebars. Color images can be interspersed through the article and should be limited to a total of 10. Visit CG&A style and length guidelines at http://www.computer.org/cga/author.html. Please submit your paper using the online manuscript submission service at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. When uploading your paper, please select the appropriate special issue title under the category "Manuscript Type." Also include complete contact information for all authors and coauthors in the submission. If you have any questions about submitting your article, please contact Manuscript Assistant Alkenia Winston at cga-ma@computer.org. Please direct any correspondence prior to submission the guest editors: Email: plaisant@cs.umd.edu; grinstein@cs.uml.edu; jean.scholtz@pnl.gov Phone: (301) 405-2768 - Catherine Plaisant Phone: (978) 934-3627 - Georges Grinstein