Category Archives: clique

Feb 2009 Clique Strategic Research Cluster funded: €3.56 million

I am one of the six principal investigators for Clique which was announced by the Irish Tánaiste as an Science Foundation Ireland funded (SFI) Strategic Research Cluster. Our industry partners, in this joint initiative are IBM, Idiro Technologies and Norkom Technologies. Our academic partners are UCD and DERI in Galway. Clique runs from 2009 – 2013 and has a focus on the analysis and visualisation of large graphs and networks, specifically social and biological networks. This is a very exciting development for my research as it will allow me to hire a number of postdocs and postgraduates but more importantly to work in a research eco-system with domain experts, industry partners, rich data sources and collaborators interested in various aspects of the end-to-end problems in visual analytics.


Many of the Clique team will be based in the UCD CASL

While these companies are providing matching funding and resources the SFI is providing €3.56 million over the course of 5 years. In total with industry and SFI funding the program has funding in excess of €5 million. The academic principal investigators involved are, Prof. Pádraig Cunningham, Prof. Denis Shields, Prof. Brendan Murphy, Dr. Aaron Quigley, Dr. Neil Hurley and Dr. Conor Hayes. The funding will be used to hire postdoctoral researchers and pay postgraduate scholarships.

The development of this research cluster has been a long time in the making. I’ve been an IBM visiting scientist since 2005 and others have been collaborating with Idiro and Norkom over a number of years. This cluster was first proposed over 1 year ago when 40 similar clusters were proposed to the SFI. The process to select these five from the forty has included a preliminary expression of interest (then review), full detailed proposal (then reviews), site visit (international panel), SFI review and board review and final the official announcement by the government! It’s a very rigourous process aimed to ensure the best research is funded, the value for the Irish tax payer is strong and the potential for industry is high.

I look forward to blogging about new team members, new research ideas, papers, outputs and commercilisation in the years to come!

[ Read SFI News Release ]

“SFI Strategic Research Clusters (SRCs) will help link scientists and engineers in partnerships across academia and industry to address crucial research questions, foster the development of new and existing Irish-based technology companies, and grow partnerships with industry that could make an important contribution to Ireland and its economy.

The SRC programme has been designed to facilitate the clustering of outstanding researchers to carry out joint research activities in areas of strategic importance to Ireland (in ICT and/or BioTech sectors), while also giving the time and resources to attract and cultivate strong industry partnerships that can inform and enhance their research programmes.”

Feb 2009 Open posts for Clique Research Cluster

Clique LogoI am one of the principal investigators for the Clique Research Cluster in Graph, Network Analysis and Visualisation based at University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland, Galway.

We are inviting applications for the following posts and funded PhD positions:

  • Senior postdoctoral researcher (UCD ref 003756)
  • Postdoctoral researcher in probablistic network modelling (UCD ref
    003755)
  • Postdoctoral researcher in analysis of information diffusion in social networks (NUIG-Clique-02)
  • 6-8 funded PhD studentships to address research challenges in
    • anomaly detection
    • biological network analysis
    • computational techniques in network analysis
    • information visualisation
    • models of information flow
    • probabilistic network models.

Please note, the closing date for this round of applications is 8th
March 2009. Please see the Clique Cluster vacancies page for more details.

Jan 2009 VDA 2009 San Jose

VDA 2009

I presented our paper on the Visual data exploration of temporal graph data at the Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2009 which was Part of IS&T/SPIE’s International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2009. This event was held on the 19-20 January 2009 in San Jose, California, USA. The paper was co-authored by Mike Farrugia and myself and is based on Mike’s masters research and his submission to the IEEE VAST 2008 contest (which he won a Cell phone Mini Challenge award).

The event itself was quite interesting due to the co-location with a number of other conferences on Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation. I also got to meet a number of interesting researchers including Katy Börner who presented a inspiring paper on “Teaching children the structure of science”. Katy is the director for the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at the School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University. I enjoyed our discussions and hearing more about the Network Workbench which will be of great interest for an upcoming project we are starting. I also enjoyed discussing research infrastructures with the highly energetic Russell Duhon. He discussed EpiC: A Computational Infrastructure for Epidemics Research with me and gave a talk on Creating Marketplaces for Science.

This is worth watching too.

Sept 2008 Clique: Graph & Network Analysis Cluster Site Visit

I am one of the six Principal Investigators for the proposed Clique: Graph & Network Analysis Strategic Research Cluster (SRC). I lead the Visulisation workpackage within the Clique cluster. On the 11th of September along with my collaborators, industry partners and collaborating academic participants we had our full day site visit from an international review panel appointed by the SFI. As you can appreciate both the pre-proposal and full proposal required considerable effort to develop. After the pre-proposal and then full international postal reviews (which were very complete and detailed) we were one of the very few groups to be called to a site visit to present our cluster proposal.

The cluster program requires substantive engagement with local SMEs and larger corporations. CLIQUE has this with a great set of complementary industry partners. For this SRC this engagement is crucial as our partners have access to the voluminous data and applied research questions. These and other issues can give rise to insightful questions but yet basic research challenges. The entire process is very rigourous with substantial international peer-review at each stage. The site visit itself was an amazing opportunity to present our proposal to a panel of academic and industrial researchers leaders. I went first (No pressure!) after our cluster lead Pádraig Cunningham presented the cluster overview. Their questions and feedback were welcome, challenging and engaging! Clearly, the research problems identified here, when solved in Ireland can yield both high quality research outputs for us and significant industry impact.

In CLIQUE, we believe that research in data analysis in the coming years will be transformed by access to large-scale data resources. An area of particular importance in data analysis is the study of collections of entities and the links between them. This research cluster will address the development of computational techniques for the analysis and visualisation of such network data. The research will be driven by the requirements of network analysis in social networks and biological networks. While these are two quite different application areas, at a data level the problems have similar structure and the practice of applying techniques developed in one area to the other is well established. In particular the transfer of techniques developed for social network analysis to biological networks has had a huge impact in recent years.

Aug 2008 Microsoft Techtalk: Social Network Visualisation

MS IrelandOn Monday the 25th of August I gave an invited Techtalk on Social Network Visualisation at Microsoft Ireland. I was invited to present by Andrzej after meeting him at AVI 2008 in Naples Italy in June.

The talk discussed the history and purpose of social network analysis and visualisation. I also gave details on a range of interactive visual representations (algorithms and methods) for abstract relational data. This visual display of data aids in human exploration and understanding of it. It is a key research
challenge. Network Visualisation is concerend with the sourcing, management, layout, drawing, viewing and interaction with relational data.

Visualisation relies on a human to guide the application of methods, structuring of queries and control of the interaction in the pursuit of understanding. In practice, the network data of interest arises from domains including social science (criminal networks, transaction networks, standard social networks, phone-call networks and disease transmission networks), bioinformatics (metabolic networks and protein-protein interaction) and ICT (computer networks, software calls and neural networks). The essential idea in relational information visualization is that the a person’s perceptual abilities are employed to understand and explore such information. Visually, humans can perceive more patterns linking local features in the data.

While research in other fields such as data mining, machine learning and knowledge management are also attempting to aid in the analysis of such voluminous data, there is a realisation that the “human-in-the-loop” visualisation affords a visual analysis of data not possible through automation alone.

Network visualisation is a broad topic so to help contextualize it I limited the scope to social networks. As such, the focus of this talk is to survey the fundamental algorithms, methods and interaction techniques along with research in my own group required to visualise large and dynamic social networks.

Short BIO:
Dr. Aaron Quigley is a College Lecturer in the School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College Dublin, a Principal Investigator in TRIL, an CAS IBM Visiting Scientist, UCD director of ODCSSS, coordinator for the EU FP7 SA CAPSIL and a researcher in Lero the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre. His research interests include pervasive computing, software engineering, information visualisation, human computer interaction, graph drawing, location and context awareness, peer-to-peer computing, surface interaction and network analysis.

He is the Program Co-Chair for the 4th International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness, (LoCA 2009) Tokyo Japan, the Late Breaking Results Co-Chair, Pervasive 2008, Sydney, Australia and Program Co-Chair, PPD’08 Workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for coupled public and
private displays, AVI 2008 Naples Italy. He has published over 65 internationally peer-reviewed publications including edited volumes, journal papers, book chapters, conference and workshop papers. His current team consists of 23 including; 7 postgraduate students, 2 postdocs, 3 research interns along with 11 TRIL research and developers based in UCD. At postgraduate level, he has graduated 1 PhD, 1 MSc and 6 Minor MSc thesis.

http://www.csi.ucd.ie/staff/aquigley/home/?Introduction:Bio

May 2008 Paper Accepted IV08: Structural Clustering

Gaudin A. and Quigley A., “Interactive Structural Clustering of Graphs based on Multi-Representations”, 12th International Conference on Information Visualisation IV08, 9 – 11 July 2008 in LSBU, London, UK (to appear)

Work based on Marie Curie International Re-Integration Grant. CoViAn: Comparative Visual Analytic techniques (e.g. structure plot, city plot and graph drawing) and their effectiveness in the exploration of large scale relational data sets. This research project operated at the junction of two sub-topics, namely large-scale relational information visualisation (graph drawing) and visual analytics. The aim was to build on our own research and existing research in these fields, and to provide a targeted comparison of three contrasting views of relational data display and exploration. Our hypothesis which we have proven through our empirical research, is simply that graph drawing techniques alone, for the exploration and navigation of large graphs are not sufficient and that a hybrid approach which incorporates multiple views of the data should be taken.

Oct 2007 Dagstuhl Seminar Invitation

I have been invited to attend a Dagstuhl Seminar in May of 2008 on Graph Drawing with Applications to Bioinformatics and Social Sciences. This is a very timely event for me, as I am working with a number of grad students, namely Mike Bennett, Mike Farrugia and Eamon Phelan on just these two areas. In addition Brendan Sheehan MSc, one of my grad students, has been developing the research and method behind CellTransformer: A Tool to Generate Reaction Networks through Graph Transformation. The timing is a little tight as I need to fly to Australia shortly afterwards where I’m the Late Breaking Results Co-Chair for Pervasive 2008, the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing.

I’m looking forward to hearing about work in both Bioinformatics and the Social Sciences and any new techniques and applications that are emerging.

To quote to organisers!

“Automated graph drawing deals with the layout of relational data arising from computer science (data base design, data mining, software engineering), and other sciences such as bioinformatics (metabolic networks, protein-protein interaction), business informatics (business process models), and criminalistics (social networks, phone-call graphs). In mathematical terms, such relational data are modeled as graphs or more general structures such as hypergraphs, clustered graphs, or compound graphs. Graph drawing communicates the relational information through diagrams drawn in the plane. The main objective is to display the data in a meaningful fashion, that is, in a way that shows well the underlying structures, and that often depends on the application domain.

In this seminar, we will to focus on graph drawing in two important application domains: bioinformatics (metabolic pathways, regulatory networks, protein-protein interaction) and social sciences and criminalistics (case information diagrams, phone-call graphs). In both application domains, the underlying information is usually stored in large data bases constituting a huge and complex graph, but only a suitable fraction of this graph is visualized and the exploration of the underlying graph is guided by the user. Thus, the user becomes a central actor that triggers dynamic updates of the displayed graph and its layout. The support of application-specific update functionality in conjunction with high quality graph layout is essential in order to gain user acceptance in the targeted application areas.”