Graph Drawing: An Overview

Prof. Therese Biedl
School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo

Wednesday, November 20
3:30 p.m. MC 5158

[Pssst... this is your friendly neighbourhood editor here. Just thought I'd mention I had Prof. Biedl for CS 360 last term and she's very good at explaining difficult concepts to a lay audience. I highly recommend going to see her speak. — AbsentEd]

Abstract
Graph Drawing is a form of data visualization where the input consists of a graph, sometimes additionally with shapes of the vertices and labels of the vertices and/or edges. Creating drawings of graphs has a wide range of applications, in areas such as software engineering, data bases, genealogy, cartography and others.

Research in the area of Graph Drawing ranges from quite theoretical ("Given a specific type of representation, for what graphs can this be achieved?") to fairly applied ("Build a graph drawing system.") I will illustrate both theoretical and applied work with three examples:

1. HH-drawings, or how to draw planar bipartite graphs,
2. a heuristic for orthogonal graph drawings, and
3. the Graph Layout Toolkit.

Reception following.

This talk is aimed at upper-year undergraduate and graduate students.

Presented by the Women in Mathematics Committee