Practical Course on Graph Visualisation (Praktikum Graphenvisualisierung)

• Instructors: Dr. Tamara Mchedlidze, PD Dr. Martin Nöllenburg
• Class meets: Tuesday 11:30 - 13:00 in Room SR301, (Informatics Building 50.34)
• Credits: 5
• Module: Graphenvisualisierung in Theorie und Praxis
• Language: English
• Registration: Please register until 10/4/2015 by sending an email to the instructors. Please notice that the number of participants is limited to 14.
• Grading scheme: The final grade depends on: the successful completion of the project (70%), final presentation (20%) and the written documentation (10%).
• Prerequisites: The course is open only for the students who passed the course „Algorithms for Graph Visualization“.

• Registration open until 10/4/2015
• First lecture on Tuesday 14/4/2015
• Topic of the project is now known and is described here

Networks are relational data that increasingly occur in various applications. Network visualisation is a basic tool to explore and understand such networks. There is a plethora of visualization styles, each of which performs better depending on an application the network comes from. The most applied visualisation styles are repeatedly studied in the research areas of Graph Visualization and Graph Drawing. This results in multiple algorithms implementing a particular style. Constructing a visualization of a particular style is usually a multi-criteria optimization problem. These optimization problems are often NP-hard and therefore heuristics are applied for their solution.

In this course, participants will work in small groups on a selected optimisation problem in the area of graph visualization from a practical perspective. The aim is to produce, by the end of the course, an executable program which creates a particular layout style and solves the optimisation problem as well as possible. Specifically, the three main phases of the course are:

• Mastering the relevant existing literature on the subject
• Design of own solutions, based on adaptations and combinations of existing algorithms, as well as development of new heuristics
• Implementation and evaluation of the developed solutions

The teams with the best programs are encouraged and will be provided any necessary help to participate in the Graph Drawing Challenge held annually during the International Symposium on Graph Drawing & Network Visualization. The topic and the procedure of the challenge will be soon announced on the web-page of the symposium. The description of last year's challenge can be found here. The winners of the 2014 challenge in the automatic category are Alexander Khomenko, Igor Karlinsky, and Denis Knöpfle from KIT who implemented their software during the Graph Visualisation course 2013-2014.