PhD Position F/M Interactive Public Dashboards for Explaining and Exploring Climate Change and Sustainability (IDP 2024)

The successful candidate will be part of the Inria team Bivwac (https://www.bivwac.fr). Weekly meetings between supervisor and student are expected, discussing process, problems, and next steps. It is expected that the candidate spends most of his time physically in the research lab.

Organizations such as Agribalyse, NASA, or governments amass enormous amounts of data to track our environment and the impacts of our decisions. These data come in the form of satellite images, sensor data, model projections, measured averages and are likewise aggregated into higher-level key-performance-indicators (KPI). The sheer wealth of measures and data can overwhelm and requires bespoke setups and interventions to help people understand

• Which data, measures, and interaction exist? 

• What do they say and how to interpret them? 

• How to use the information to make data-driven decisions for citizens and organizations? 

The goal of this project is to explore, develop, and evaluate applications for public dashboards to communicate and explore data around climate change and sustainability. Public dashboards are an emerging genre for information, decision making, and education. Inspired by the recent trend of public Covid19 dashboards, energy and climate dashboards in news magazines (e.g., http://zeit.de), and advances in immersive technologies such as mixed reality and large-wall displays [2], this project aims to explore the potential of large-wall public dashboards to help explain and explore data. For example, this project is a collaboration with NASA team for the Earth Now Dashboard (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/earth-now-dashboard) that delivers near-realtime information about the earth based on NASA's own data and bespoke data visualizations. Such dashboards can be imagined in museums, town-halls, and other public spaces, but also as part of collaborative and participative expert decision making processes. Existing research on dashboards [3] and immersive spaces has so far ignored the aspect of explanations and lay people, having focused mainly on analytical expert scenarios. 

However, designing public dashboards comes with serious challenges in the form of the following research questions.  

Research question  1: What are effective visualizations understood by lay audiences and how can we design them? how can these visualizations be made effective and into a coherent dashboard design and experience? Addressing this question will require solutions to show data on a global level, finding effective visual representations for multivariate and temporal data, defining and visualizing KPIs and measures, and organizing these informations on a common display [4].

Research question  2: How to explain data and visualizations? Currently, dashboards are considered as pure interfaces to the data but without taking into account explanation and active explanation of its components [5]. However, we do not have good solutions to effectively explain the vast amount of information and visualization shown on such dashboards.  

Research question 3: Interaction and personalization: What are effective means to allow people explore and personalize their dashboard experience? This question asks for novel technical solutions compatible with large public dashboards, i.e., without interrupting other people engaging with the dashboard but providing some degree of collaboration. Within this project, we aim to explore using mixed and augmented reality to allow for interaction while augmenting and personalizing information shown on the dashboard display.

[1] M. H. Goldberg, A. Gustafson, and S. Van Der Linden. Leveraging social science to generate lasting engagement with climate change solutions. One Earth , 3(3):314–324, 2020

[2] Ens, B., Bach, B., Cordeil, M., Engelke, U., Serrano, M., Willett, W., ... & Yang, Y. (2021, May). Grand challenges in immersive analytics. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-17).

[3] Sarikaya, A., Correll, M., Bartram, L., Tory, M., & Fisher, D. (2018). What do we talk about when we talk about dashboards?. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 25(1), 682-692.

[4] Bach, B., Freeman, E., Abdul-Rahman, A., Turkay, C., Khan, S., Fan, Y., & Chen, M. (2022). Dashboard design patterns. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 29(1), 342-352.

[5] Riche, N. H., Hurter, C., Diakopoulos, N., & Carpendale, S. (Eds.). (2018). Data-driven storytelling. CRC Press.

Main activities:

• Analyse the requirements of partners, scenarios
• Read scientific literature
• Designing novel visualization and interaction techniques
• Evaluate visualization and interaction techniques
• Writing scientific papers

Additional activities:

• Implement visualization and interaction techniques
• Communicate research to project partners and research groups and at conference

Technical skills and level required:

• Web-development 
• Visualization development (D3, WebGL, mapbox, ...)

Languages: 

• English, fluently

Relational skills:

• Interdiscplinary professionalism
• Communcation skills

Other valued appreciated:

• Team-work
• Criticality and creativity

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage

• 2100€ / month (before taxs) during the first 2 years,
• 2190€ / month (before taxs) during the third year