Interactive Visualization and Smart Warning

The most influential challenge in meaningful visualization is to represent large data sets that satisfy specific user needs. In Human-computer Interaction (HCI), particularly in visualization, there are challenges to designing an adequately simple system concerning better interaction and user experience. The key intuition to design goals in HCI to explore and understand the data by a non-expert user. A good data visualization also concerns the design decisions such as abstraction of data as per user's cognitive ability/load and clustering of data into groups as per useful goals.
We are trying to apply the visualization technique in education settings, particularly in ICT based classroom, to visualize the real-time status of the students. The visualization techniques will help the teacher to explore details about the students' engagement with the teaching-learning. Whether and how many of the students are engaged with the teaching-learning process. The augmented information will help the instructor to decide further corrective actions if required. Currently, we are emphasizing to develop classroom visualization techniques using cluster-based visualization through a limited size display device such as a smartphone/tablet. We are motivated to research this because it is challenging for a teacher to visualize real-time status. The status means which and/or how many in-class students are engaged/understanding, particularly when the classroom is large. We hope that this will significantly improve the teaching-learning process.

We are also working on designing smart warnings for the classroom uses. The warnings/alert or the notifications should be sent in a smartphone/tablet, including peripheral smart-band. The affective computing team of our lab is working to build a sensitive classroom where the students' engagement and understanding level will be identified automatically by using the data from digital backchannel and embedded sensors of smartphones/tablets. Once these have been identified, it is required to alert the students' who are not engaged. It is also necessary to warn the teacher if most of the students are not engaged/not understanding what the teacher is teaching. Systematic alert generation is challenging. The major challenges are

• When and what type of alert should be sent to a particular student(s) without disturbing the other students.
• How frequently the teacher should be alerted without interrupting the flow of the lecture.