Recently, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (ACM CHI 2020 for short) released its paper acceptance result. A collaborative paper with the title of “MaraVis: Representation and Coordinated Intervention of Medical Encounters in Urban Marathon” (MaraVis for short) between WeBank AI Group, Tencent CSIG Jarvis Lab, and HKUST was accepted by CHI 2020, which is also the first paper accepted by the top conference in the field of human-computer interaction from WeBank.

CHI conference is one of the three A-level conferences in the field of human-computer interaction and pervasive computing. The papers accepted by the CHI conference are world-recognized for the high quality. It is reported that CHI 2020 received 3126 papers and the paper acceptance rate is only 24.31%. The acceptance of MaraVis also represents the international recognition of WeBank’s achievements in the field of visual analytics and interactive intelligence.

There is an increased use of Internet-of-Things and wearable sensing devices in the urban marathon to ensure an effective response to unforeseen medical needs. However, the massive amount of real-time, heterogeneous movement and psychological data of runners impose great challenges on prompt medical incident analysis and intervention. Conventional approaches compile such data into one dashboard visualization to facilitate rapid data absorption but fail to support joint decision-making and operations in medical encounters. This paper presents MaraVis, a real-time urban marathon visualization and coordinated intervention system. MaraVis first visually summarizes real-time marathon data to facilitate the detection and exploration of possible anomalous events. Then, it calculates an optimal camera route with an arrangement of shots to guide offline effort to catch these events in time with a smooth view transition.

System Overview of MaraVis

WeBank AI Group also launched visual analytics applications in other fields. For example, WeBank AI Group establishes an intelligence system covering retail goods sales prediction and facility location issues in the field of smart retail. To be specific, the team launched a retail goods sales prediction system which forecasts the sale volume in hour-level. By combining the historical sales data, the insight of customers’ profiles can be obtained to optimize the overall goods planning, which can further update the traditional retail industry mode from “production-based selling” to “selling based production”. Moreover, the team combines the frontier technology of visualization and visual analytics with professional domain knowledge and proposes resolutions to the pain points in the industry, forming the interactive “human-in-the-loop” analysis. The team also proposed visual analytics solutions in the fields of risk management, smart retail and supply chain, medical health, enterprise management, and urban traffic management.

The successful launch of the above applications cannot be separated from the theoretical support. The team continuously strengthens its theoretical research. For example, in July of 2019, WeBank AI Group won the “Visual Analytics Design Award” in the data visualization competition of the 6th China Visualization and Visual Analytics Conference (ChinaVis 2019); The team’s work “Multi-Agent Visualization for Explaining Federated Learning” was also showcased in the top AI conference IJCAI 2019. For more cases, please visit our website: https://vis.webank.com.

The acceptance of MaraVis represents that WeBank has achieved great progress in the field of visual analytics and interactive intelligence. In the future, WeBank will collaborate with more business partners in both academia and industry. WeBank is also committed to exploring a new path of fintech with autonomous, controllable, safe and reliable AI technology and leading a new direction of the AI industry.

To know more about WeBank AI group, please visit https://ai.webank.com