Designing Collaborative Visual Analytics Tools: From Supporting Experts to Engaging The Public

Due to the complexity of the problems, collaboration of people with different backgrounds and expertise is becoming increasingly necessary. Collaborative Visual Analytic (CVA) tools allow users to collaboratively examine large datasets, interactively explore relationships and trends in data, develop new hypotheses and insights and make (better) decisions. However linking collaboration and visualization together poses unique challenges. In this talk I will describe an overview of my PhD research in designing CVA tools to provide better support for collaboration, and decision-making with a focus on empowering experts. I will also present my current multidisciplinary research that investigates how to engage the public in the complex process of community design through use of visualization and collaboration technologies. Finally I will discuss a vision about the future of CVA tools and some other interesting directions that I would like to pursue in the future.