Collecting huge amounts of data (big data) is playing an increasingly greater role in society. However, to extract useful information from this mountain of data a good visual representation of the data is needed. Kevin Verbeek’s work focuses on the fundamental aspect of such visualizations, particularly the data that change over time, or dynamic data as they are known. Such data play a role, for instance, in the stock market, in the transport sector or weather forecasts.

Verbeek, university lecturer in the Algorithms and Visualization group, wants to use his Veni grant to try to improve the stability of such visualizations. “It is important that a difference in the data corresponds roughly to the difference in the visualization, so it is especially important that any small differences in these data do not cause a constant jump in the visualization. This is confusing and makes it almost impossible to recognize interesting patterns in the data,” according to Verbeek.

The Veni grant is intended for highly promising, young researchers that gained a PhD no longer than three years ago. The award – up to 250,000 euros – can be spent on a research topic of choice. This year NWO selected 161 winning researchers from 1124 applications.