An interview with…Paolo Buono

Today we are going to restart the “Interview serie” with infovis people around the globe and we will talk to Paolo Buono, PhD from Dipartimento di Informatica - Università degli Studi di Bari.

1 - When, how and why have you decided to research on infovis ?
My interest for infovis started together with my master thesis in 1998 almost by chance, I was interested in user interfaces before but only with the thesis I started to study in depth the work that researchers are doing in this field.

2 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?
In the project I have been worked so far I have found something that have been interested me. I have worked in several European projects, I liked working in projects composed by partners coming from different countries because I think that putting together different cultures is a good way to grow.
I had also the opportunity to work with many “state of the art” technologies, for instance I worked with web services when this approach was just born.
Another interesting project I worked was TimeSearcher, that was during a visiting period in the well famous HCIL, University of Maryland. I suggest to everyone to have a period outside its country. If possible I suggest to cross the sea, in order to have a double experience, both from a research point of view and a social point of view. The period should be at least three-six months long.

3 - On what themes are you working now ?
Currently I’m working on data analysis and visual data mining. Visual data mining is having a decrease in interest, probably because today many researcher that work on data mining exploits the results of information visualization in order to improve their investigations, and, on the other hand, information visualization researchers uses some data mining engine to better analyze data. There are several papers that explain this topic, one of them is “Shneiderman, Inventing discovery tools: combining information visualization with data mining, Information Visualization Journal, March 2002, 1(1), Palgrave Macmillan Journals”. I’m also starting to be interested in GIS system and, of course, their user interface.

4 - If you should suggest an education programme to a student interested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?
Students should look inside the curriculum if courses related to HCI are present. This area is quite wide and hosts several skills. People involved in HCI can be also software designers, computer graphics expert or psychologists.

5 - How do you think infovis researches will evolve in your country for next years ?
The current trend is that a growing number of people is more careful about the development of user interface. In the past the application were good if they just worked. Now, complex systems are used also by non expert people.
The evolution of infovis in my country? Everybody is watching the evolution everyday, because the speed the applications evolve is very high.
The research is moving from the classic display of a monitor to different devices, the computer is changing its form and become integrated in dresses, or there are new devices that visualize information to the user, like LCD transparent screen that can be rolled (some implementation are already in the marked), projectors that can display information on irregular walls, big displays.
I think that in Italy (but also all around the world) most of the effort now is about visualizing information on different devices, possibly connected to Internet. I think that the classic desktop will be just one of those devices.