2010 International Workshop on Visual Languages and Computing

Visual computing involves theory, methods and application of enhancing the visual space, along with human interaction, within the field of computing. One may visualize unstructured data, simple information structures, and more complicated structures such as automata, programs, and databases. Moreover, visual computing is a field that involves the representation or modeling of artifacts and their behaviors or executions. Thus, it is possible to visualize heaps, their execution or entire programs in which the heap plays an algorithmic role. The ways in which the human interacts with the heap through pure visualization, touch, or sound becomes a relevant issue. The concept of transformation is integral to visual computing, where it is often convenient to transform one type of object into another, sometimes for a specific group or individual.

Aspects of visual computing are multi-facetted in goals that are to be achieved during information or language design. The following represents a short list of qualities that are of importance to the study within visual computing: efficiency, aesthetics, pleasure, emotion, engagement, immersion, collaboration, and culture. Aspects of art, engineering, and science play key roles where certain practitioners focus on design and engineering of visual interactions whereas others analyze and study these interactions (i.e., science).

The International Workshop on Visual Languages and Computing will explore these issues, and will be held in conjunction with the 2010 International Conference of Distributed Multimedia Systems (http://www.ksi.edu/seke/dms10.html). Papers on all aspects and approaches to visual languages and computing are solicited, including interactive visual computing, computer-empowered visual computing, human-empowered visual computing, transformation algorithms for visual computing, and visual languages for visual computing.