Information Retrieval for Climate Impact

The purpose of the MANILA24 Workshop on information retrieval for climate impact was to bring together researchers from academia, industry, governments, and NGOs to identify and discuss core research problems in information retrieval to assess climate change impacts. The workshop aimed to foster collaboration by bringing communities together that have so far not been very well connected -- information retrieval, natural language processing, systematic reviews, impact assessments, and climate science. The workshop brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners interested in contributing to the development of a technical research agenda for information retrieval to assess climate change impacts.

Using dynamic circles and squares to visualize spatio-temporal variation

Visualizations such as bar charts, scatter plots, and objects on geographical maps often convey critical information, including exact and relative numeric values, using shapes. The choice of shape and method of encoding information is often arbitrarily, or based on convention. However, past studies have shown that the human eye can be fooled by visual representations. The Ebbinghaus illusion demonstrates that the perceived relative sizes of shapes depends on their configuration, which in turn can affect judgements, especially in visualizations like proportional symbol maps. In this study we evaluate the effects of varying the type of shapes and metrics for encoding data in visual representations on a spatio-temporal map interface. We find that some combinations of shape and metric are more conducive to accurate human judgements than others, and provide recommendations for applying these findings in future visualization designs.