Welcome to EuroVis 2010

Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Visualization, June 9 - 11, Bordeaux, France


Author Guide for EuroVis 2010

New This Year | Paper Types | Review Process and Author Expectations

New This Year

Paper Types

EuroVis solicits novel ideas in a broad range of research topics and approaches, including spatial data and techniques (scientific visualization), non-spatial data and techniques (information visualization), and visual analytics. We have extended the range of paper types from just Research and Application to the five types used in the InfoVis and Vis conferences: algorithm/technique, system, application/design study, evaluation, and theory/model papers.

We discuss these categories below as a guide to authors and reviewers. While papers can include elements of more than one of these categories, we ask authors to specify the most appropriate single choice in the submission process. Please see Process and Pitfalls in Writing Information Visualization Research Papers by Tamara Munzner for more detailed discussion on how to write a successful visualization paper that includes an extensive discussion on paper types. While these guidelines were written from the point of view of an infovis researcher, they apply more broadly to general visualization papers.

Algorithm/Technique papers introduce novel techniques or algorithms that have not previously appeared in the literature, or that significantly extend known techniques or algorithms, for example by scaling to datasets of much larger size than before or by generalizing a technique to a larger class of uses.
The technique or algorithm description provided in the paper should be complete enough that a competent graduate student in visualization could implement the work, and the authors should create a prototype implementation of the methods. Relevant previous work must be referenced, and the advantage of the new methods over it should be clearly demonstrated. There should be a discussion of the tasks and datasets for which this new method is appropriate, and its limitations. Evaluation through performance benchmarks, informal or formal user studies, or other methods will often serve to strengthen the paper.

Examples include: algorithms for isosurface extraction or rendering; data analysis techniques for visualization (such as transfer function design and interaction); topology and geometry based techniques for data exploration; algorithms for understanding of vector and tensor fields; interaction techniques for visualization; geometric or graphics algorithms for increased scalability of existing techniques; algorithms for layout and navigation of trees, graphs, and networks; browsing and navigation techniques in large information spaces; techniques for visualizing spaces of dozens or hundreds of dimensions. This list is not exhaustive, and we welcome submissions in these and all other areas of visualization and visual analytics.

Application/Design Study papers explore the choices made when applying visualization techniques in an application area to make the case that the proposed visual representation is the solution for a particular domain problem. The research contribution of a design study is not typically a new technique or a refinement of one, as in an Algorithm/Technique paper, but rather a well-reasoned justification of how existing techniques can be usefully combined. An implementation is expected, and deployment to target users strengthens the paper. A Design Study should include the requirements analysis for the particular problem, which may require a certain amount of background information about the domain. The visual encoding and interaction mechanisms should be clearly explained and justified in terms of how well they fulfill these requirements with respect to alternative possibilities. The validation of Design Study paper may include case studies documenting insights found by target users in the application domain, formal or informal user studies, or lessons learned by the designers.

Examples include application areas such as the oil and gas industry, medical and biomedical analysis, simulation and fluid flow, mathematical visualization, bioinformatics, databases, finance, and computer-supported cooperative work. We invite submissions on any application area.

Evaluation papers explore the usage of visualization by human users, and typically present an empirical study of visualization techniques or systems. We solicit a wide range of studies and methodology: laboratory and field, quantitative and qualitative, short term and long term. Authors are not necessarily expected to implement the systems used in these studies themselves; the research contribution will be judged on the validity and importance of the experimental results as opposed to the novelty of the systems or techniques under study. The conference committee appreciates the difficulty and importance of designing and performing rigorous experiments, including the definition of appropriate hypotheses, tasks, data sets, selection of subjects, measurement, validation and conclusions. We do suggest that potential authors who have not had formal training in the design of experiments involving human subjects may wish to partner with a colleague from an area such as psychology or human-computer interaction who has experience with designing rigorous experimental protocols and statistical analysis of the resulting data, or from anthropology or human-computer interaction who has experience with ethnographic analysis and qualitative observational methods.

Examples include evaluation metrics for image quality, empirical comparisons of user performance with different visual representations or visualization systems, field studies and usability analyses of visualization designs, and the identification of and testing of new evaluation metrics and methods.

Theory/Model papers present new interpretations of the foundational theory of visualization. Implementations are usually not relevant for papers in this category. Papers should focus on basic advancement in our understanding of how visualization techniques complement and exploit properties of human vision and cognition.

Examples include the treatment of the rendering integral, visualization taxonomies, task taxonomies, cognitive models, color models, extensions to Bertin's theories of visual encoding, and models to measure the value of visualizations.

System papers focus on the architectural choices made in the design of a visualization infrastructure, framework, or toolkit. A systems paper typically does not introduce new techniques or algorithms in the way that an Algorithm/Technique paper does. It also does not introduce a new design for an application that solves a specific problem, which would be better suited for the Design Study type. An implementation of the system is expected. The paper should include the rationale for significant design decisions, and the lessons learned from building the system and from observing its use. The system should be compared to documented, best-of-breed systems already in use, with specific discussion of how the described system differs from and is, in some significant respects, superior to those systems. For example, the described system may offer substantial advancements in the performance or usability of visualization systems, or novel capabilities. Every effort should be made to compare fairly given external factors such as advances in processor performance, memory sizes, or operating system features. For further suggestions, please review "How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper" by Roy Levin and David Redell and "Empirical Methods in CS and AI" by Toby Walsh.

Examples include visualization toolkit, library, and framework designs.

Review Process and Author Guidelines

All papers accepted to EuroVis 2010 will appear in a special issue (June 2010) of Computer Graphics Forum containing the conference proceedings, and will appear at the same time in the Eurographics digital library.

We expect that the submissions will clearly discuss the novel and significant contributions as well as place them in the context of prior art in the field. Authors must highlight how their contributions differ and advance the state of the art in visualization. Among the venues for important prior art are the journals Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), and Information Visualization Journal; and the conferences EuroVis, EGPGV (Parallel Graphics and Visualization), Vis, InfoVis, and PacificVis.

EuroVis 2010 will use a double-blind review process for the first review cycle. Author identities will be hidden from the external reviewers. However, you will still need to provide a complete list of authors at the time of the submissions so that members of the program committee can avoid conflicts of interest during reviewer assignment. All authors must be specified in the initial submission, adding additional authors after the acceptance of a paper is not acceptable. Authors should therefore not include their name or institution on the cover page of the initial submission, and should make an effort to ensure that there is no self-revealing information in the text. Authors should cite all relevant previous work and clearly explain the differences between it and their paper, including their own previous work. The authors should do in a way that does not reveal which of the bits of previous work happen to be their own. For example, do not say "In our previous work on foobar [13] ... " and then have "[13] Removed for blind review" for the citation. Instead, simply discuss the work in the third person: "We build on the previous work of Smith [13] ... " and then have the full reference. If it is impossible to do so, for instance because the work is submitted or in press but not yet publicly available, then include an anonymized version of the relevant document(s) with your submission as supplemental material. Authors should not include an Acknowledgements section in the submission, nor should they post their submitted manuscript on the web before the notification date of the first review cycle.

Note that submission of an abstract for each paper is mandatory by November 27, 2009, with full papers due on December 4th. All submissions must be original works that have not been published previously in any conference proceedings, magazine, journal, or edited book. Concurrent submissions are strictly forbidden. If it is determined that a manuscript is simultaneously under the consideration by another publication venue, the manuscript will be immediately rejected.

Papers will undergo a revision and review cycle after initial notification of review results in order to ensure they are acceptable for publication and presentation in the journal.

At least one author of an accepted paper must attend the conference to present the work, and authors will also be required to present a very brief one-minute summary of their talk at the opening papers preview session.