Computers Math

Researchers at The Ohio State University have developed new software to aid in the development, evaluation and demonstration of safer autonomous, or driverless, vehicles.
Called the Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) method, it allows the testing of driverless cars in a perfectly safe environment, said Bilin Aksun-Guvenc, co-author of the study and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.
Imagine a driverless car is placed in the middle of an empty parking lot. Although it is driving, it isn’t reacting to the real world, but to input from the software, which tells the car what the road looks like, and what cars, pedestrians and hazards it is meeting along the way.
“With our software, we’re able to make the vehicle think that it’s driving on actual roads while actually operating on a large open, safe test area,” said Aksun-Guvenc. “This ability saves time, money, and there is no risk of fatal traffic accidents.”
The study, published recently in the journal Sensors, found that by immersing self-driving machines in a virtual environment, the technique can help the car learn to avoid possible car collisions, increase pedestrian safety, and react to rare or extreme traffic events.
Although autonomous driving technologies have become a much more common sight on the road in the last few years, due to the sheer number of accidents these systems have caused, the way these technologies are tested deserves closer scrutiny, Aksun-Guvenc said.

“Our future depends on being able to trust any and all road vehicles with our safety, so all of our research concepts pertain to working towards that goal,” said Aksun-Guvenc, who is also co-director of Ohio State’s Automated Driving Lab, a research group originally formed in 2014 to advance autonomous vehicle technologies.
Current approaches for demonstrating autonomous vehicle functions involve testing software and technology first in simulations and then on public roads. Yet this method essentially turns other road users into involuntary participants in these driving experiments, said Aksun-Guvenc, and such risks can make the entire development process costly, inefficient, and potentially unsafe for both drivers and pedestrians alike.
To overcome the limitations of these faulty assessments, researchers in this study replaced the output of high-resolution sensors in a real vehicle with simulated data to connect its controls to a highly realistic 3D environment, much like giving the machine a VR headset or virtual reality glasses. After feeding the data to the autonomous driving system’s computers and syncing the car’s real motions with the simulations’, researchers were able to show that it behaves as if the virtual environment were its true surroundings in real time.
But what makes their software especially powerful, said Levent Guvenc, co-author of the study and also co-director of the Automated Driving Lab, is the strength of how flexible their virtual environment can be. “When actual senses are replaced by virtual senses, the model can be easily changed to fit any kind of scenario,” said Guvenc.
Because the VVE method can be calibrated to maintain the properties of the real world while modeling rare events in the virtual environment, it could easily simulate extreme traffic scenarios, like someone jumping in front of a vehicle, to mundane ones like pedestrians waiting at a crosswalk, he said.

Additionally, with the help of a communication app for vehicle-to-pedestrian connectivity, the software can use Bluetooth to communicate between a pedestrian with a mobile phone and a phone in the test vehicle. The researchers had a pedestrian actually dart quickly across a simulated road a safe distance from the test vehicle. But the Bluetooth signal told the car that the person was darting right in front of it.
“The beauty of the method is that road users can share the same environment at the same time without being in the same location at all,” said Guvenc. And although generating these super-realistic environments can take time, he said the technological challenge of syncing different environments to use in real-time simulations is one challenge their team has solved.
The team has also filed a patent for the technology. In the future, Guvenc said he’d also like to see it be integrated into traffic guidelines made by groups such as The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“We could see this technology becoming a staple in the industry in the next five or 10 years,” said Guvenc. “That’s why we’re focusing on building more applications for it.”
Other Ohio State co-authors were Xincheng Cao, Haochong Chen and Sukru Yaren Gelbal. More

A new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge reveals a surprising discovery that could transform the future of electrochemical devices. The findings offer new opportunities for the development of advanced materials and improved performance in fields such as energy storage, brain-like computing, and bioelectronics.
Electrochemical devices rely on the movement of charged particles, both ions and electrons, to function properly. However, understanding how these charged particles move together has presented a significant challenge, hindering progress in creating new materials for these devices.
In the rapidly evolving field of bioelectronics, soft conductive materials known as conjugated polymers are used for developing medical devices that can be used outside of traditional clinical settings. For example, this type of materials can be used to make wearable sensors that monitor patients’ health remotely or implantable devices that actively treat disease.
The greatest benefit of using conjugated polymer electrodes for this kind of devices is their ability to seamlessly couple ions, responsible for electrical signals in the brain and body, with electrons, the carriers of electrical signals in electronic devices. This synergy improves the connection between the brain and medical devices, effectively translating between these two types of signals.
In this latest study on conjugated polymer electrodes, published in Nature Materials, researchers report on an unexpected discovery. It is conventionally believed that the movement of ions is the slowest part of the charging process because they are heavier than electrons. However, the study revealed that in conjugated polymer electrodes, the movement of “holes” — empty spaces for electrons to move into — can be the limiting factor in how quickly the material charges up.
Using a specialised microscope, researchers closely observed the charging process in real-time, and found that when the level of charging is low, the movement of holes is inefficient, causing the charging process to slow down a lot more than anticipated. In other words, and contrary to standard knowledge, ions conduct faster than electrons in this particular material.
This unexpected finding provides a valuable insight into the factors influencing charging speed. Excitingly, the research team also determined that by manipulating the microscopic structure of the material, it is possible to regulate how quickly the holes move during charging. This newfound control and ability to fine tune the material’s structure could allow scientists to engineer conjugated polymers with improved performance, enabling faster and more efficient charging processes.
“Our findings challenge the conventional understanding of the charging process in electrochemical devices,” said first author Scott Keene, from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and the Electrical Engineering Division. “The movement of holes, which act as empty spaces for electrons to move into, can be surprisingly inefficient during low levels of charging, causing unexpected slowdowns.”
The implications of these findings are far-reaching, offering a promising avenue for future research and development in the field of electrochemical devices for applications such as bioelectronics, energy storage, and brain-like computing.
“This work addresses a long-standing problem in organic electronics by illuminating the elementary steps that take place during electrochemical doping of conjugated polymers and highlighting the role of the band structure of the polymer,” said George Malliaras, senior author of the study and Prince Philip Professor of Technology in the Department of Engineering’s Electrical Engineering Division.
“With a deeper understanding of the charging process, we can now explore new possibilities in the creation of cutting-edge medical devices that can seamlessly integrate with the human body, wearable technologies that provide real-time health monitoring, and new energy storage solutions with enhanced efficiency,” concluded Prof. Akshay Rao, co-senior author, also from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. More

A team led by Nagoya University researchers in Japan has successfully predicted crystal orientation by teaching an artificial intelligence (AI) using optical photographs of polycrystalline materials. The results were published in APL Machine Learning.
Crystals are a vital component of many machines. Familiar materials used in industry contain polycrystalline components, including metal alloys, ceramics, and semiconductors. As polycrystals are made up of many crystals, they have a complex microstructure, and their properties vary greatly depending on how the crystal grains are orientated. This is especially important for the silicon crystals used in solar cells, smartphones, and computers.
“To obtain a polycrystalline material that can be used effectively in industry, control and measurement of grain orientation distribution is required,” Professor Noritaka Usami said. “However, this is hindered by the expensive equipment and time current techniques needed to measure large-area samples.”
A Nagoya University team consisting of Professor Usami (he, him) from the Graduate School of Engineering and Professor Hiroaki Kudo (he, him) from the Graduate School of Informatics, in collaboration with RIKEN, have applied a machine learning model that assesses photographs taken by illuminating the surface of a polycrystalline silicon material from various directions. They found that the AI successfully predicted the grain orientation distribution.
“The time required for this measurement was about 1.5 hours for taking optical photographs, training the machine learning model, and predicting the orientation, which is much faster than conventional techniques, which take about 14 hours,” Usami said. “It also enables measurement of large-area materials that were impossible with conventional methods.”
Usami has high hopes for the use of the team’s technique in industry. “This is a technology that will revolutionize materials development,” Usami said. “This research is intended for all researchers and engineers who develop polycrystalline materials. It would be possible to manufacture an orientation analysis system of polycrystalline materials that packages an image data collection and a crystal orientation prediction model based on machine learning. We expect that many companies dealing with polycrystalline materials would install such equipment.” More

Encouraging adolescents to feel capable and purposeful — rather than just happy — could improve their academic results as well as their mental health, according to new research which recommends changing how wellbeing is supported in schools.
The University of Cambridge study, involving over 600 teenagers from seven English schools, examined two separate aspects of their wellbeing: life satisfaction and ‘eudaimonia’. While life satisfaction roughly equates to how happy a person is, eudaimonia refers to how well that person feels they are functioning. It incorporates feelings of competence, motivation and self-esteem.
Researchers found that students with high levels of eudaimonia consistently outperformed their peers in GCSE-level assessments, especially Maths. On average, those achieving top Maths grades had eudaimonic wellbeing levels 1.5 times higher than those with the lowest grades.
No such link was found between academic performance and life satisfaction. Despite this, child wellbeing policy in England tends to focus on life satisfaction. The Government has, for example, recently added ‘happiness’ to national curricula as part of its Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) guidance, emphasising teaching adolescents how to feel happy and resilient while managing negative emotions.
Previous research has pointed to the importance of fostering adolescents’ eudaimonic wellbeing by nurturing their personal values, goals and sense of self-worth. The new study appears to strengthen that case by demonstrating a positive link between eudaimonia and academic performance.
Its lead author, Dr Tania Clarke, is a psychologist of education who now works for the Youth Endowment Fund, but undertook the study for her doctoral research at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. The findings are published in School Psychology Review.

“Wellbeing education often focuses on teaching students about being happy and not being sad.” Clarke said. “That is over-simplistic and overlooks other vital qualities of wellbeing that are particularly salient during the formative period of adolescence.”
“Adolescents also need to develop self-awareness, confidence, and ideally a sense of meaning and purpose. Judging by our findings, an adolescent who is currently getting a 3 or 4 on their Maths GCSE could be helped to rise a couple of grades if schools emphasised these qualities for all students, rather than just promoting positivity and minimising negative emotions.”
The study involved 607 adolescents, aged 14-15. Participants completed an established psychological assessment called ‘How I feel about myself and school’, which measures both life satisfaction and eudaimonia, as well as feelings of interpersonal relatedness and negativity.
These measures were compared with their scores in mock English and Maths GCSEs. The research also assessed whether the students exhibited a ‘growth mindset’: a belief in their personal capacity for improvement. Many educators consider this essential for enhancing academic performance.
The students’ overall wellbeing — their eudaimonia and life satisfaction combined — clearly correlated positively with their exam results. Those attaining top Maths grades (Grades 8 or 9) had, on average, a wellbeing score of 32 out of a possible 50. This was nine points higher than those with a Grade 1, and three to four points higher than the average for all 607 students.

When they analysed the separate dimensions of wellbeing, however, the researchers found a positive relationship between eudaimonia and higher attainment, but no correlation with life satisfaction. In Maths, the average eudaimonic wellbeing score of Grade 9 students was 17.3 from a possible 25, while that of Grade 1 students was just 10.9. These results held true even when accounting for potentially confounding factors, such as school attended, gender, socio-economic status, or special educational needs.
The study also found that a growth mindset did not predict good academic results, although students with high eudaimonic wellbeing did tend to exhibit such a mindset. Other research has similarly struggled to draw a clear link between growth mindset and academic progress, but does link it more generally to positive mental health. This implies that eudaimonia, as well as supporting better attainment, may also underpin important aspects of self-belief, leading to broader mental health benefits.
Clarke’s wider research suggests that various constraints currently limit schools’ capacity to promote eudaimonic wellbeing. In an earlier Review of Education article she published the results of in-depth interviews with some of the same students, which highlighted concerns about a ‘performativity culture’ stemming from a heavy emphasis on high-stakes testing. These interviews indicated that many students associate ‘doing well’ with getting good grades, rather than with their own strengths, values and goals.
Students said they often felt worthless, inadequate or “dumb” if they failed to get high marks in tests. “You let your scores define you,” one student told Clarke. “Then you feel really low about… your worth and everything. You think it’s literally the end of the world.” Ironically, the new findings suggest that by limiting teachers’ capacity to support students’ personal growth, the heavy emphasis on exam results and testing may be undermining academic progress, at least in some cases.
Clarke suggested that eudaimonic therapy, which increasingly features in professional mental health psychology for adolescents, could be incorporated more into wellbeing education. In particular, her study underscores the need to help students understand their academic work and progress in the context of their personal motivations and goals.
“There is a link between better wellbeing and a more nuanced understanding of academic success,” Clarke said. “Because schools are under heavy pressure to deliver academic results, at the moment students seem to be measuring themselves against the exam system, rather than in terms of who they want to be or what they want to achieve.”
Dr Ros McLellan, from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, who co-authored the study, said: “Wellbeing education needs to move beyond notions of ‘boosting’ happiness towards deeper engagement, helping adolescents to realise their unique talents and aspirations, and a sense of what happiness means for them, personally. This would not just improve wellbeing: it is also likely to mean better exam results, and perhaps fewer issues for students later on.” More

New research from the University of Montana and its partners suggests artificial intelligence can match the top 1% of human thinkers on a standard test for creativity.
The study was directed by Dr. Erik Guzik, an assistant clinical professor in UM’s College of Business. He and his partners used the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a well-known tool used for decades to assess human creativity.
The researchers submitted eight responses generated by ChatGPT, the application powered by the GPT-4 artificial intelligence engine. They also submitted answers from a control group of 24 UM students taking Guzik’s entrepreneurship and personal finance classes. These scores were compared with 2,700 college students nationally who took the TTCT in 2016. All submissions were scored by Scholastic Testing Service, which didn’t know AI was involved.
The results placed ChatGPT in elite company for creativity. The AI application was in the top percentile for fluency — the ability to generate a large volume of ideas — and for originality — the ability to come up with new ideas. The AI slipped a bit — to the 97th percentile — for flexibility, the ability to generate different types and categories of ideas.
“For ChatGPT and GPT-4, we showed for the first time that it performs in the top 1% for originality,” Guzik said. “That was new.”
He was gratified to note that some of his UM students also performed in the top 1%. However, ChatGTP outperformed the vast majority of college students nationally.

Guzik tested the AI and his students during spring semester. He was assisted in the work by Christian Gilde of UM Western and Christian Byrge of Vilnius University. The researchers presented their work in May at the Southern Oregon University Creativity Conference.
“We were very careful at the conference to not interpret the data very much,” Guzik said. “We just presented the results. But we shared strong evidence that AI seems to be developing creative ability on par with or even exceeding human ability.”
Guzik said he asked ChatGPT what it would indicate if it performed well on the TTCT. The AI gave a strong answer, which they shared at the conference:
“ChatGPT told us we may not fully understand human creativity, which I believe is correct,” he said. “It also suggested we may need more sophisticated assessment tools that can differentiate between human and AI-generated ideas.”
He said the TTCT is protected proprietary material, so ChatGPT couldn’t “cheat” by accessing information about the test on the internet or in a public database.

Guzik has long been interested in creativity. As a seventh grader growing up in the small town of Palmer, Massachusetts, he was in a program for talented-and-gifted students. That experience introduced him to the Future Problem Solving process developed by Ellis Paul Torrance, the pioneering psychologist who also created the TTCT. Guzik said he fell in love with brainstorming at that time and how it taps into human imagination, and he remains active with the Future Problem Solving organization — even meeting his wife at one of its conferences.
Guzik and his team decided to test the creativity of ChatGPT after playing around with it during the past year.
“We had all been exploring with ChatGPT, and we noticed it had been doing some interesting things that we didn’t expect,” he said. “Some of the responses were novel and surprising. That’s when we decided to put it to the test to see how creative it really is.”
Guzik said the TTCT test uses prompts that mimic real-life creative tasks. For instance, can you think of new uses for a product or improve this product?
“Let’s say it’s a basketball,” he said. “Think of as many uses of a basketball as you can. You can shoot it in a hoop and use it in a display. If you force yourself to think of new uses, maybe you cut it up and use it as a planter. Or with a brick you can build things, or it can be used as a paperweight. But maybe you grind it up and reform it into something completely new.”
Guzik had some expectation that ChatGPT would be good at creating a lot of ideas (fluency), because that’s what generative AI does. And it excelled at responding to the prompt with many ideas that were relevant, useful and valuable in the eyes of the evaluators.
He was more surprised at how well it did generating original ideas, which is a hallmark of human imagination. The test evaluators are given lists of common responses for a prompt — ones that are almost expected to be submitted. However, the AI landed in the top percentile for coming up with fresh responses.
“At the conference, we learned of previous research on GPT-3 that was done a year ago,” Guzik said. “At that time, ChatGPT did not score as well as humans on tasks that involved original thinking. Now with the more advanced GPT-4, it’s in the top 1% of all human responses.”
With AI advances speeding up, he expects it to become a key tool for the world of business going forward and a significant new driver of regional and national innovation.
“For me, creativity is about doing things differently,” Guzik said. “One of the definitions of entrepreneurship I love is that to be an entrepreneur is to think differently. So AI may help us apply the world of creative thinking to business and the process of innovation, and that’s just fascinating to me.”
He said the UM College of Business is open to teaching about AI and incorporating it into coursework.
“I think we know the future is going to include AI in some fashion,” Guzik said. “We have to be careful about how it’s used and consider needed rules and regulations. But businesses already are using it for many creative tasks. In terms of entrepreneurship and regional innovation, this is a game changer.” More

We interact with bits and bytes everyday — whether that’s through sending a text message or receiving an email.
There’s also quantum bits, or qubits, that have critical differences from common bits and bytes. These photons — particles of light — can carry quantum information and offer exceptional capabilities that can’t be achieved any other way. Unlike binary computing, where bits can only represent a 0 or 1, qubit behavior exists in the realm of quantum mechanics. Through “superpositioning,” a qubit can represent a 0, a 1, or any proportion between. This vastly increases a quantum computer’s processing speed compared to today’s computers.
“Learning about the capabilities of qubits has been a driving force for the emerging field of quantum technologies, opening up new and unexplored applications like quantum communication, computing and sensing,” said Hong Koo Kim, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering.
Quantum technologies are important for a number of fields, like for banks protecting financial information or providing researchers with the speed needed to mimic all aspects of chemistry. And through quantum “entanglement,” qubits could “communicate” across vast distances as a single system. Kim and his graduate student, Yu Shi, made a discovery that may help quantum technology take a quantum leap.
It begins with a single photon
Photon-based quantum technologies rely on single photon sources that can emit individual photons.
These single photons can be generated from nanometer scale semiconductors, more commonly known as quantum dots. Similar to how microwave antennas broadcast mobile phone signals, a quantum dot acts as an antenna that radiates light.
“By performing rigorous analysis, we discovered that a quantum dot emitter — or a nanometer scale dipole antenna — traps a large amount of energy,” Kim explained. “The outer regime operation of a dipole emitter is well understood, but this is really the first time a dipole has been studied on the inside.”
Photons from those quantum dots come out with handedness, like us a right-handed or left-handed person, and quantum information is carried by this handedness of individual photons. As such, sorting them out to different pathways is an important task for quantum information processing. Kim’s team has developed a new way of separating differently-handed photons and efficiently harvesting them for further processing down the road.
“The findings of this work are expected to contribute to developing high-speed single photon sources, a critical component needed in quantum photonics,” Kim said. More

Workers feeling a specific form of stress are more likely than others to become the victims of a phishing attack, according to a study at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
While most — if not all — of us feel stress in the workplace, scientists identified a specific form of stress that indicates who is more vulnerable to clicking on bogus content that could lead to malware and other cyber ills. The work could help workers and their employers increase their cybersecurity defenses by recognizing the warning signs when someone is about to make a risky click.
The team’s results from a study of 153 participants were published recently in the Journal of Information Warfare. The researchers noted that while the relatively small sample size limited their ability to tease out all of the relationships among more than two dozen variables they studied, the relationship between stress and response to the simulated phishing email was statistically significant.
The costs of phishing attacks are enormous. An analysis sponsored by Proofpoint and conducted by the Ponemon Institute estimates that large U.S. businesses lost, on average, $14.8 million apiece to fraudsters via phishing in 2021 alone.
Defenses include not just better technology but also improved awareness by would-be victims.
“The first step to defend ourselves is understanding the complex constellation of variables that make a person susceptible to phishing,” says PNNL psychologist Corey Fallon, a corresponding author of the study. “We need to tease out those factors that make people more or less likely to click on a dubious message.”
In their study, Fallon and colleagues found that people who reported a high level of work-related distress were significantly more likely to follow a phony phishing email’s link. Every one-point increase in self-reported distress increased the likelihood of responding to the simulated phishing email by 15 percent.

The scientists describe distress as a feeling of tension when someone on the job feels they’re in a difficult situation and unable to tackle the task at hand. Distress might stem from feeling their workload is too high, or they might be questioning whether they have adequate training or time to accomplish their work.
Fancy phish to explore phishing psychology
The 153 participants had agreed to take part in a study, but they were unaware that the phishing email sent a few weeks later was part of the planned study into human factors research.
As far as phishes go, this was a fancy phish. There was no mention of a large sum of money from an African prince, for example, and there were no outright spelling mistakes or gross grammatical errors.
“These were well-crafted emails deliberately designed to trick people and tailored to the organization,” said Jessica Baweja, a psychologist and an author of the study. “It was much harder to detect than the average phish.”
Each participant received one of four different versions of a message about an alleged new dress code to be implemented at their organization. The team tested three common phishing tactics separately and together. Here’s what they found: Urgency. 49 percent of recipients clicked on the links. Sample text: “This policy will go into effect 3 days from the receipt of this notice…acknowledge the changes immediately.” Threat. 47 percent clicked. “…comply with this change in dress code or you may be subject to disciplinary action.” Authority. 38 percent clicked. “Per the Office of General Counsel…” The three tactics together: 31 percent clicked.

While the team had expected that more tactics used together would result in more people clicking on the message, that wasn’t the case.
“It’s possible that the more tactics that were used, the more obvious it was a phishing message,” said author Dustin Arendt, a data scientist. “The tactics must be compelling, but there’s a middle ground. If too many tactics are used, it may be obvious that you’re being manipulated.”
In day-to-day operations, PNNL tests its staff with fake phishing emails periodically. Typically around just 1 percent of recipients will click. Far more employees spot the phish early on and provide crowd-sourced alerting to the Laboratory’s cybersecurity experts, said Joseph Higbee, PNNL’s chief information security officer. When a real phishing email is detected, the Laboratory purges the system of all instances of the email immediately. The information is frequently shared with other DOE laboratories.
Human-machine teaming to reduce cybersecurity risk
How can companies and employees use this data to reduce the risk?
“One option is to help people recognize when they are feeling distressed,” said Fallon, “so they can be extra aware and cautious when they’re especially vulnerable.”
In the future, one option might be human-machine teaming. If an algorithm notes a change in a work pattern that might indicate fatigue or inattention, a smart machine assistant could suggest a break from email. Automated alerts are becoming more common, for instance, when a driver drifts unexpectedly and the car issues a warning about fatigue. The researchers noted that the potential benefits of input from a machine assistant would need to be weighed against employee privacy concerns.
“It can be hard to see email as a threat,” said Baweja. “Our ancient brains aren’t wired to equate email with scary things. You’re working through emails all day and it’s routine; there’s little reason to think they could harm you or our organization.
“Organizations need to be thinking about how to encourage people to make good choices. People overestimate their ability to detect phishing emails,” she added.
PNNL researchers are continuing the work, but with a twist. Instead of asking what makes people more vulnerable to phishing, they will conduct a small study of people who resisted the bait, to learn more about their traits and state of mind as they monitor their email.
The work is part of a broader program in human-machine teaming and human factors research at PNNL, which recently hosted a Symposium on Human Factors.
The work was funded by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. In addition to Arendt, Baweja and Fallon, authors include Ji Young Yun and Nick Thompson of PNNL and Zhuanyi Shaw, formerly of PNNL. More

Computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently found that data-visualization experts have no agreed-upon understanding of who makes up one of their largest audiences — novice users. The work, which recently won a coveted Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), is an important first step in ensuring more inclusive data visualizations, and thus data visualization that works for all users.
Data visualization is the representation of data in a visual and easily understandable way using common graphics such as charts, plots, infographics and animations. Using visual elements provides an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers and patterns in data. One of the most familiar data visualizations — the pie chart — is legible to nearly everyone and has been a method used to quickly convey information since its invention in the early nineteenth century.
But, with the advent of the internet, the range, reach and complexity of such visualizations have grown exponentially. Think of the various online COVID trackers, graphics showing economic projections or the outcomes of national elections. “More and more, everyday people are relying on data visualizations to make decisions about their lives,” says Narges Mayhar, assistant professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Science at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Even many of our collective decisions rest on data visualizations.”
Since a visualization’s use is dependent on its intelligibility, one would think that data visualization experts would have a clear and standard understanding of their audience, particularly their non-expert users. And yet, “despite many decades of data-visualization research, we had no clear notion of what makes someone a ‘novice,'” says Mayhar. This insight was important enough that the ACM CHI, the premier international conference for human-computer interaction, bestowed the Best Paper Award on the research, an honor reserved for the top 1% of submitted papers.
Mayhar, lead author Alyxander Burns, who completed the research as part of his graduate studies at UMass Amherst, and their co-authors combed through the past 30 years of visualization research and found 79 papers spread across seven academic journals that concerned themselves with identifying the audience for data visualizations. Within those 79 papers, they found that the definitions of a novice user ranged widely, from people who have difficulty “effectively utilizing GPU clusters” to those who lack knowledge of “ontological models.” Moreover, the team found that most researchers’ sample groups of users overwhelmingly skewed toward white, college-aged people living in the U.S.
“How do we know that the visualizations we create could work for older people, for those without college degrees, for people living in one of the world’s many other countries?” asks Mayhar. “We need to be clear, as a field, what we mean when we say ‘novice,’ and the goal of this paper is to change the way that visualization researchers think about novices, address their needs and design tools that work for everyone.” More