In many topics of visualization studied in Professor Ito's Laboratory, there are a number of applications related to social science. This page introduces our visualization research themes, which are closely linked to this study area.

　

Theft, forgery and abuse of credit cards have been serious social problems. Especially in recent years, cases involving credit cards abuse using tricky techniques like skimming have risen considerably, so the establishment of robust technologies are eagerly anticipated to minimize the damages.
The diagram shows a visualization of the distribution of credit card abuse history. Today, many credit card firms employ the system which issue warnings when the purchase can be an abuse. Analyzing the data of abuse detected by this system shows there is a definite relationship among period of purchased time, purchased goods and distributors. This visualization study could reveal the types that are frequently seen in the abuse of credit cards and may contribute to rulemaking through detecting the frauds.
This study is a joint research with Intelligent Wave Incorporation.

　

There are an increasing number of people who try malicious intrusions and attacks to the computer networks. Serious situations like service interference of online shopping, and leak of official secrets of the companies or municipalities are reported. A real-time detective system is expected to be developed in order to minimize the damages from the malicious attacks.
The diagram is a visualization of distribution of unnatural accesses to many computing machines. The real-time control of these visualization results may enable the administrator to detect such accesses at an early stage, so that there may be less damages by the attacks and intrusions.
This study is a joint research with Mr.Takakura, an associate professor of Kyoto University, and some part of research is commissioned by JPCERT Coordination Center.

　

Extracting a trend and tendency from large amount of documents is useful in many areas. For example, extracting related documents from series of newspaper articles, and common techniques from academic papers and patent application documents seem to be valuable.　
This diagram shows a visualization example which describes a distribution of the business articles from Mainichi Shinbun in 1998 by using a technique called " SAKYO AND UKYO". The left side shows the distribution of some keywords and the right side shows the result of grouping highly-correlated articles. This visualization technique enables us to investigate the details of correlation in newspaper articles when both the right and left sides interact with each other.
In this research, corpus database was offered by "Workshop on Multimodal Summarization for Trend Information (MuST)."
The function of "SAKYO AND UKYO" is extended to visualise journal information, as well as business article information.

　

Architects and managers of websites, and also people who are involved in internet businesses always pay attention to the facts that what type of people are interested and how they browse the websites. We have focused on major routine access patterns and are developing their visualisation method.
This diagram shows the visualised access patterns of a website. The circular and square dots are described as web pages, and the line segments between the dots are expressed as links, and the types of access patterns are shown by the colors in the dots.
From this visualisation result, we can observe the situations of what kind of access patterns exist or how a number of webpages which make up the patterns are accessed through links.

　

In many workplaces, they figure out the project progress as a great number of tasks. It enables us to evaluate the rationality of each task by observing the progress structurally.
This diagram expresses the collective tasks hierarchically and color-coded according to its loads. The visualization makes the rational task evaluation easier, showing the concentration of the task load in particular sites or the time loss which occurs from the gap in the expected speed of several tasks.
This visualization method could be applicable not only to task managements but also to various kinds of issues which are done parallel in chronological order. We are also experimenting to apply this visualization method in the case of monitoring the progress of parallel computer programs.