UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS: 2019/2020
EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN DATA
ANALYTICS
MDA 5302: HUMAN PERCEPTION & INFORMATION VISUALIZATION
ORDINARY EXAMINATIONS
DATE: MAY, 2020 TIME: 14 DAYS
INSTRUCTIONS: Answer ALL Questions
Take-Home Examination (THE)
QUESTION 1 (15 MARKS)
SGR trains are known to be not very punctual in its operations. You have been hired as an
information visualization expert to build a system that can highlight whether there are trends and
patterns or certain hidden insight that if known may help them improve their operations. The data at
their disposal has;
• For every day the departure and arrival times of all trains in all stations along the NairobiMombasa route.
• All complaints from passengers over time
The task is to find an appropriate way to visualise these data to enable them get an understanding of
what the passengers consider as important. They also want to visualise these views as they change
in the course of a delay.
Required;
• By reviewing a variety of visualisations including: Line plot, river pixel, matrix, Node-link,
clouds, galaxies, maps. Text, glyph, icon etc, decide on which is the most appropriate techniques
to capture the data at SGR’s disposal. Explain your answer and also give a sketch of the
technique chosen.
QUESTION 2 (15 MARKS)
There are a number of institutions that are mapping the COVID-19 virus. Some good examples can
be found at:
• Johns Hopkins Data visualiser at;
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b
48e9ecf6
• Dashboard of the COVID-19 Virus Outbreak in Singapore at;
https://co.vid19.sg/singapore/clusters
• Tableaus COVID-19 data hub at; https://www.tableau.com/covid-19-coronavirus-data-resources
Required;
a) Identify 5 Information Visualization representations that best depict information around
COVID-19 that you deem useful to the general public. Explain your choices and share
the screenshots.
b) Identify 5 Information Visualization representations that best depict information around
COVID-19 that you deem useful to health workers. Explain your choices and share the
screenshots.
c) Critically analyse your choices above. Explain their shortcomings in view of their
intended audiences and suggest ways that they can be improved.
QUESTION 3 (20 MARKS)
For a long time, graphs have been studied in mathematics and information technology and are
naturally suited to representing entities where there is a network organization to represent.
Graphs are a very efficient form of representation for network data, but unfortunately they have the
disadvantage of not being very scalable: By increasing the number of nodes, the graph becomes too
complex and not very readable.
Required;
Write a brief technical paper that reviews some of the ongoing research into the problem of
complex graphs especially in relation to increasing the number of nodes representable in a graph, or
to improving their legibility.
Hint: The paper has capture the very recent research in graph visualization. Include in your
submission a full list of references. Your paper has to adhere to the APA style. (paper should not
be more than 3 pages, A4, font size 12 and 1.5 spacing).
