LIST research leads to new international book launch

Published on 18/06/2021

A brand-new book stemming from years of research at LIST, reports and workshops, has just been released and published.

Entitled “Visual Analysis of Multilayer Networks” the book is the brainchild of Fintan Mc Gee, Data Visualization Researcher in LIST’s ITIS (IT for Innovative Services) department, with contributions from fellow researchers Mohammad Ghoniem and Benoît Otjacques.

The initial building blocks that helped create the book began several years ago as Fintan explained. “We were on a joint Luxembourgish-French funded project called BLIZAAR which focused on the visualization of multilayer networks.. As part of this project we worked on a tool which has been the basis for much other work at LIST since then”.

Part of the project involved work on a state-of-the-air report which was then published and formed the nugget of the new book.

“Also during this project, I organised a workshop on visualization of multilayer networks across disciplines. There’s an institute in Germany called Schloss Dagstuhl based around research seminars,” stated Fintan. “The idea is you get some researchers with a mix between big names and early stage researchers, and you submit a proposal to Dagstuhl saying we want to organise a week-long  seminar, here’s a list of people we’d like to invite and here’s what we’d like to talk about”.

Fintan coordinated an international group of researchers as seminar organisers, and the proposal was sent and accepted, and subsequently a seminar was held in February 2019

“We wanted to have follow-on activities and one of my ideas was a workshop on multilayer network visualization at a large visualization conference. As part of the proposal we also stated that we would like to publish a book based on our discussions,” said Fintan.

At the largest conference in this field of work known as VIS, a forum for advances in visualization and visual analytics, Fintan decided to organise a workshop along with Mohammad Ghoniem and other attendees from the seminar. “We took the state-of-the-art report that we developed as part of the BLIZAAR  project as a framework , and thoroughly revised and built on it with significant contributions from other researchers who were part of the workshop, and had also attended the original seminar,” Fintan outlined.

The final author list included researchers from Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, and Wales as well as three from LIST. “It was quite a long process. Trying to get researchers to work on something together when they are very busy is quite a challenge. But eventually we got the final version at the end of 2020 and that went for review, the reviews were very good. We recently finished copy editing and of course the book has just been published”.

The audience of “Visual Analysis of Multilayer Networks” is aimed at PhD students starting on visualization of multilayer networks and experienced researchers who want to be up to date on the topic, “as it proposes a lot of future research directions,” explained Fintan. “It is also targeted at the application domain experts”.

The book is now available in physical formats and also as a PDF file from publishers Morgan and Claypool.

> For more information view the book information flyer

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Dr Fintan MC GEE
Dr Fintan MC GEE
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Dr Mohammad GHONIEM
Dr Mohammad GHONIEM
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Dr Ir Benoît OTJACQUES
Dr Ir Benoît OTJACQUES
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