Explaining Data to People

1
Explaining Data to People

• Ehud Reiter
• (Univ of Aberdeen)
• http//www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/ereiter

2
The Problem

• A persons memories is likely to include
  technical data
• Medical, finance, legal, educational,
• How can we explain these to the man in the
  street
• Not very useful otherwise

3
Example Scuba Dive

• Many divers wear sensors which record depth at
  time points
• Surely part of divers Memory
• But kilobytes of numbers not very useful
• Want summaries
• your deepest dive ever
• Want analyses
• this dive was dangerous, you ascended too
  quickly

4
Challenges

• Data analysis
• What is interesting, relevant?
• Linguistic (graphical) communication
• What is user has reading age of 8?
• Affect
• Bad news (dont dive again today)
• Many more!