Tangible Tensors: An Interactive System for Grasping Trends in Biological Systems Modeling

Abstract

Advances in biology and computational power have led to the availability of large biological data sets, yet these advances raise new design challenges. Designers must build effective tools that cater to the needs of biologists and data scientists in order to visually explore and manipulate data for modeling and analysis. We present the Tangible Tensors system, a new tensor-based visualization and tangible manipulation tool that serves to improve functionality over previous data analytics approaches. We designed a platform that supports iterative exploration of the solution space and better interpretation tools for biologists. User study results indicate that our system is easy to learn and use, and useful for data modeling and analysis tasks.