A lot of valuable work has been done in visualization research in the past decades. Certain topics, like medical visualization, flow visualization, tabular data visualization, and network visualization have attracted continued interest and every year fascinating findings are presented. Often, we focus on the important work of optimizing solutions and maturing the field. Every now and then, however, we also see a chance for radical innovation, for new pioneering research in visualization. In this talk, we take a look at one of these chances, i.e., to go from the visualization of individual datasets to visually studying large sets of datasets, for example from medical cohort studies or from numerical ensemble simulations. It seems that relevant new visualization challenges arise when hundreds or thousands of datasets are studied simultaneously—in particular, when these are sets of multi-aspect spatiotemporal datasets. This talk brings up some of the related major questions (for example: how to map such data to the 2D/3D visualization space), together with examples of related work, and hopefully inspires some bright minds to conduct more visualization research on this topic of increasing relevance.

Helwig Hauser graduated in 1995 from Vienna University of Technology in Austria and in 1998 he finished his PhD project on the visualization of complex dynamical systems (flow visualization). In 2003, he got his Habilitation at TU Wien, entitled ''Generalizing Focus+Context Visualization''. His research has been repeatedly awarded, including the Heinz-Zemanek Award by OCG and the Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine from Eurographics. With about 200 refereed publications and close to 10,000 citations (h-index > 50), he is an active and respected member of the international visualization community. After first working for TU Wien as assistant and later as assistant professor (1994–), he changed to the VRVis Research Center in 2000 (having been one of the founding team), where he led the basic research group on interactive visualization until 2003 before he became the scientific director of VRVis. Since 2007, he is professor in visualization at the University of Bergen in Norway, where he built up a new research group on visualization.