Facilitating Decision-Making with Multimodal Interfaces in Collaborative Analytical Sessions

In collaborative visual analytics sessions, participants analyze data and cooperate toward a shared vision. These decision-making processes are challenging and time-consuming. In this chapter, we introduce a system for facilitating decision-making in exploratory and collaborative visual analytics sessions. Our system comprises an assistant analytical agent, a multi-display wall and a framework for interactive visual analytics. The assistant agent understands participants’ ongoing conversations and exhibits information about the data on displays. The displays are also used to manifest the current state of the session. In addition, the agent answers the participants’ questions either regarding the data or open-domain ones, and preserves the productivity and the efficiency of the session by confirming that the participants do not deviate from the session’s goal. Whereas, our visual analytics medium makes data tangible, hence more comprehensible and natural to operate with. The results of our qualitative study indicate that the proposed system fosters productive multi-user decision-making processes.

Y. Findik, H.A. Boz, B. Bozkaya, S. Balcisoy. "Facilitating Decision Making with Multimodal Interfaces in Collaborative Analytical Sessions." In Textbook of Intelligent Scene Modeling and Human-Computer Interaction. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham, June 2021.
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