Preparing Undergraduates for Visual Analytics

Visual analytics (VA) combines the strengths of human and machine intelligence to enable the discovery of interesting patterns in challenging datasets. Historically, most attention has been given to developing the machine component. But it is also essential to develop the abilities of the analysts themselves, especially at the beginning of their careers. For the past several years, the University of British Columbia (UBC)--with the support of Boeing--has experimented with various ways of preparing undergraduate students for VA. The result of this experimentation is a third-year undergraduate course titled Cognitive Systems 303 (COGS 303) that focuses on "VA unplugged"--that is, on developing investigative abilities prior to training on the VA systems themselves.