MRes Student Kostas Cheliotis Wins "An Eye on IRIS" prize

We're pleased to announce that Kostas Cheliotis, an MRes Student at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, has won the Vice Provost - Research Visualisation prize, "An Eye on IRIS", with his geographical visualisation of achievement data from UCL academics.IRIS is the UCL system led by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) which captures data about the research, funding and achievements of UCL academic and research staff. Students at CASA were given a sample of "achievement" data - for example, information relating to invited talks, public engagement activities, media appearances, memberships of learned societies - many of the activities that don't fall cleanly into "research" or "teaching" categories. It was up to the the students to categorise and make sense of the data, and then to map or visualise them appropriately.

The competition was judged by Martin Zaltz Austwick and Andrew Hudson-Smith of CASA, Melissa Terras of Digital Humanities and Suren Rajeswaran of IRIS, and they had a tough time selecting between some excellent entries.

Kostas Cheliotis

Kostas Cheliotis' mapping visualisation was chosen as the winner due to its clean interface, clear user guidance and the ability to filter the data by year and category, all of which he executed in Processing.

Bala Soundararaj

Bala Soundararaj's JavaScript visualisation was highly commended due to its appealing design and it's basis on an online platform, making dissemination fast and effective.

Daniel Lam

Daniel Lam's OmniScope - based representation was commended for allowing the user to interrogate and drill into the data.

Although the entrants produced individual entries, they collaborated to organise the data, working together to create an underlying dataset that they could all base visualisations upon. The competition was open to all students on the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, CASA's one-year Research Masters which covers mapping, data visualisation and spatial modelling. Applications are open for full-time study until August 2nd, so if you'd like to apply you'll need to get your application in soon. If you're interested in studying this year or next, part-time or full-time, please get in touch.

Many thanks to all the entrants, to the judges and to the OVPR for providing the prize (£100 of Amazon vouchers) and the sample data.