Swarm Systems in the Visualization of Consumption Patterns
Authors: Catarina Maçãs, Pedro Cruz, Pedro Martins, Penousal Machado
IJCAI 2015 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details
| Reproducibility Variable | Result | LLM Response |
|---|---|---|
| Research Type | Experimental | We apply a swarm based system as a method to create emergent visualizations of data that convey meaningful information in an inciting way, exploring the boundaries between Data Visualization and Information Aesthetics. The approach is used to visually convey the consumption patterns in 729 Portuguese hypermarkets over the course of two years. The analysis of the experimental results focuses on the ability of the emergent visualizations to communicate information while engaging the viewer with organic visuals. |
| Researcher Affiliation | Academia | Catarina Mac as and Pedro Cruz and Pedro Martins and Penousal Machado CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra Coimbra, Portugal cmacas@dei.uc.pt, pmcruz@dei.uc.pt, pjmm@dei.uc.pt, machado@dei.uc.pt |
| Pseudocode | No | The paper describes the system and its rules in text but does not include any structured pseudocode or algorithm blocks. |
| Open Source Code | No | The paper provides a link for viewing visualizations: "Large scale renderings of all the visualizations presented in this paper can be found at: http://cdv.dei.uc.pt/swarmviz/". However, it does not explicitly state that the source code for the methodology or system described in the paper is available at this or any other location. |
| Open Datasets | No | The data consists of the consumptions in 729 Portuguese supermarkets and hypermarkets of the SONAE chains, who cover the entire country. We choose this dataset due to its richness, size, quality and nature. No information is provided about public availability or access to this dataset. |
| Dataset Splits | No | The paper describes the data used as 'consumptions in 729 Portuguese supermarkets and hypermarkets of the SONAE chains' and how it was aggregated (e.g., 'in intervals of two hours'), but it does not specify any training, validation, or test splits for experimental reproduction. |
| Hardware Specification | No | The paper does not provide specific details about the hardware (e.g., CPU, GPU models, memory) used to run the experiments or generate the visualizations. |
| Software Dependencies | No | The paper describes the implementation of a Swarm System but does not provide specific software dependencies with version numbers (e.g., programming languages, libraries, frameworks, or operating systems). |
| Experiment Setup | Yes | We implement a Swarm System, constituted by several boids in an environment, that reacts to the evolution of consumption over time (Figure 1). In this system, each boid represents the consumptions in one of the seven Departments of the product hierarchy of the hypermarkets. Through the three rules proposed by Craig Reynolds, i.e. cohesion, separation, and alignment, the boids interact with each other. These rules have different forces applied to them depending whether two interacting boids represent the same Department or not. Besides, each boid has a radius property which affects how distant it must be from the other boids. We apply higher forces to the separation rule, define that the cohesion rule is just applied to the boids of the same Department, apply higher alignment forces among boids of the same Department than for the boids of different Departments. The results of this exploration are similar to the ones of the previous exploration. In this visualization the boids are slightly more separated, and we can see that when the consumption grows the boids tend to break away from the main path (Figures 6 and 7). Then, to further explore this effect of separation, we maintain the same separation forces but we define different minimum distances between the boids. |