Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities to support discovery. These telescopes for high-dimensional data combine powerful statistical methods with user-controlled interfaces. Users can begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration can provide 100msec updates even for million-item visualizations that can represent billion-record databases.

This talk reviews the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. and research tools for time series data such as (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher ).

The central theme is the integration of statistics with visualization as applied to temporal event sequences such as electronic health records (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines2 and www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifeflow) and social network data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction and www.codeplex.com/nodexl).