#openvis

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Here at Union Metrics we like to give our employees the chance to enrich themselves and their careers by attending a conference of their choice each year. Here’s Senior Front-End Engineer Ben Kimball’s experience at OpenVis, in his own words.

Our Senior Front-End Engineer Goes to OpenVis. 

Here at Union Metrics, we regularly need to make sense of large amounts of data, from millions of tweets to a stream of Instagram photos. While at the OpenVis Conference in Boston last week, Senior Front-End Engineer Ben Kimball caught one particularly eye-catching presentation by Ian Webster, who demonstrated a system for visualizing large data sets— and they don't come much larger than space! Asterank is a scientific and economic database of over 600,000 asteroids. It focuses on estimating the costs and rewards of mining asteroids. For example, you can use it to find the most valuable asteroid we know of (511 Davida, a chunk of nickel, cobalt, and iron 200 miles across worth roughly 27 million trillion US dollars) or the most cost-effective asteroid to mine (1999 JU3, $34.5 billion in profit which will be just 0.4 AU from Earth on July 24th of next year). You can also explore a visualization of discovered exoplanets, superimposed on our solar system. Most of them are closer to their sun than Earth is to ours. And then there's the Millenium Run, "the largest n-body supercomputer simulation ever," which traces the evolution of over 10 billion pieces of dark matter. You can fly through it. 

The takeaway? Even if you’re not working with giant flying space rocks, you can distill large amounts of data into something of value for your audience by concisely teaching them something they didn’t know before, and/or giving them a way to interact with the data to learn something new on their own. 

Since there are so few authorities on this topic, I'm hoping my explorations can begin with sets of ongoing conversations with people from various fields. It only seems natural to try to better understand uncertainty not by referencing or becoming an authority on the matter, but by organically mapping out the questions we all have and hypothesis to test. 

There's currently an open call for speakers at Bocoup's OpenVis conference, set in Boston this April. A shared spreadsheet of topics the organizers would like to see covered has been going around, and it seems like one of the most agree-upon wants is for someone to talk about visualizing uncertainty. A number of others listed have to do with the role of art and aesthetics in data design.