[Asis-l] UNC Professor David Gotz awarded over $1 million in NSF funding to develop advanced data visualization methods

[Perales, Katherine Pearl]

UNC SILS Professor David Gotz awarded over $1 million in NSF funding to develop advanced data visualization methods

David Gotz, Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and Assistant Director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP), has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant worth over $1 million to develop a set of contextual visualization methods that will improve analysis of complex data sets. Gotz and his team will evaluate the new methods in a health outcomes setting, offering significant potential to improve health care through data analytics. Ultimate goals for the four-year project include the development of open-source software that can help advance data visualization accuracy and efficacy for enterprises around the world.

"Datasets can have many thousands of variables, a stark contrast to the relatively small number of dimensions supported by current visualization tools," Gotz said. "The gap between what the data contains and what the visualization shows can put the validity of any analysis at great risk of bias, potentially leading to serious, hidden errors. This research project will develop a new approach to high-dimensional exploratory visualization that will help detect and reduce selection bias and other problems."

Gotz and his team will build on the premise that the very summarization that makes many visual methods effective also inherently obscures important aspects of a high-dimensional datasets. In other words, people cannot fully understand complex data, or make good decisions based on that data, if they are relying on a visualization that omits or misrepresents the context of the findings.

Read more at https://sils.unc.edu/news/2017/gotz-nsf