Visualizing Election Polls

A New, Animated, Interactive Way to Analyze Opinion Data

Media Contacts

Oct. 6, 2008 - Do you want to know the percentage of white women who support vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin? What about college-educated versus high school-educated white women? Or those who also hunt?

University of Utah computer scientists have written software they hope eventually will allow news reporters and citizens to easily, interactively and visually answer such questions when analyzing election results, political opinion polls or other surveys.

The software displays data in the form of "radial" charts that are doughnut-shaped and include features of traditional pie charts and bar graphs. The charts are interactive and animated so they change as a computer user asks to analyze poll results as a function of various demographic data.

"We have developed new techniques for exposing complex relationships that are not obvious by usual methods of statistical analysis," says Richard Riesenfeld, a University of Utah professor of computer science and co-author of a study outlining the new way of visualizing polling data.

Geoff Draper, a doctoral student and researcher with the university's Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, devised the new method as part of his Ph.D. thesis. Riesenfeld is his thesis advisor.

"I wanted to create a way to make it easy for the masses to analyze data," and that includes news reporters and television news anchors, says Draper, who is scheduled to present his study on Oct. 19 during the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Information Visualization Conference in Columbus, Ohio.

Analyzing the Numbers: From Elections to Diseases to Terrorism

When pollsters release their results, extensive survey data often are boiled down to a few key questions. TV news anchors and reporters cannot easily manipulate the data on the air to quickly answer a question that may arise, such as - in a college town - how full-time students feel about Obama and McCain.

To produce tables and graphs with common poll-analysis software, users must receive training, and then manipulate a spreadsheet containing large grids of numbers.

"If you generate a graph and don't like the way it looks, you cannot change the graph just by manipulating the graph itself," says Draper. "You have to go back to the source data. You have to throw away the graph and start over."

Charts in the new software are animated and change in real time as a person uses a computer mouse to drag and drop parameters - such as "female," "black" or "income over $50,000" - into the center of the doughnut-shaped chart displaying poll results.

"Rather than navigate an external interface, queries [new questions about poll results] are constructed directly within the visualization itself," Draper and Riesenfeld wrote in their study outlining the new method.

Despite developing the software to analyze poll or election results, "the tool is general enough to let you analyze any type of demographic data," Draper says, noting that a university might use it to easily categorize students by various demographic groups. The software also could be used by health officials to analyze demographic characteristics of patients with a certain disease, or by homeland security officials and police to look for common factors among known terrorists or other criminals.

How the New Software Works

The software produces charts with three parts:

• An outer ring listing one or more questions asked during a survey, such as, "What is your opinion of John McCain?" and "What is your opinion of Barack Obama?"
• An inner doughnut hole that is used to narrow the question to certain demographic groups. If the hole is empty, the answers to the questions come from all respondents to the poll. But the software user can click on a menu, then drag into the hole parameters such as "college graduate or post-graduate" and "earn between $100,000 and $150,000 per year."
• The poll results are shown in a large middle ring between the outer ring and the inner hole. The large ring is divided into curved bars - somewhat like pie slices with their tips chopped off - and each bar lists an answer and related percentage (such as "Mostly favorable, 48.1 percent" under "Opinion of John McCain"). When the center hole is empty, the results list the percentages of all survey respondents with opinions of McCain and Obama that are "very favorable," "mostly favorable," "mostly unfavorable" and so on. When parameters such as education and income are dragged and dropped into the center hole, the results shown reflect only the opinions of those groups shown, such as college grads and post-graduates with incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 per year.

Draper says his poll-analysis software is not quite ready for prime time.

"Right now it is an academic project. My goal is to get the idea out there and let other software developers incorporate our visual methods into their products. The software would be useful for news reporters to go on the air and move the icons around and show how different demographic groups voted, how they feel about certain issues. Eventually, it might be used by the general public."

Draper tested the software using exit polling data for the November 2007 election on two ballot measures and the election of Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker. He asked two political science professors and 52 novices to try it. They were asked to use the software to perform nine analysis tasks, such as, "What percentage of women voted for Ralph Becker?" and "Of those voters whose location is east of State Street, what percentage earned a post-graduate degree?"

Eighty-eight percent said they enjoyed using the software and 71 percent completed all the tasks without errors.

Draper named the new software Simple Query Interface with a Radial Layout, or SQiRL (pronounced "squirrel").

A video demonstrating the new poll-analysis software may be viewed at the following address. It may take a few minutes to load:

http://www.sci.utah.edu/sci_gallery/radial_charts/2008_Dartboard.mov

(Credit video to Geoff Draper and Chems Touati, University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute.)

For more information about the University of Utah College of Engineering, see:

http://www.coe.utah.edu/

University of Utah Latest in a Growing List of Exceptional Schools Demonstrating Pioneering Work in Parallel Computing

Santa Clara, CA & Salt Lake City, UT - July 31, 2008 - NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, and the University of Utah today announced that the university has been recognized as a CUDA Center of Excellence, a milestone that marks the beginning of a significant partnership between the two organizations.

NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology is an award-winning C-compiler and software development kit (SDK) for developing computing applications on GPUs. Its inclusion in the University of Utah's curriculum is a clear indicator of the ground-swell that parallel computing using a many-core architecture is having on the high-performance computing industry. The University of Utah is also the second school to be recognized as a CUDA Center of Excellence along with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over 50 other schools and universities now include CUDA technology as part of their Computer Science curriculum or in their research.

Distinguished members of the University of Utah's faculty and alumni have been behind a remarkable fraction of the graphics innovations made in the last 40 years, as well as pioneering companies such as Adobe, Evans & Sutherland, Pixar and Silicon Graphics. Together, NVIDIA and the University of Utah will continue this industry-changing work and deliver technologies that harness the processing power of the GPU (graphics processing units) and the award-winning CUDA programming environment.

"Often before a great discovery there is the creation of a new tool or a tool that is used in a different way than before," said Chris Johnson, director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah. "GPUs and the algorithms and software that they use are today's tools and with them we are entering a golden age, where scientific computing is going to truly change the way we do science and medicine."

As a CUDA Center of Excellence, the University of Utah will be using CUDA technology extensively across three faculties:

• Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute
  • The SCI Institute has established itself as an internationally recognized leader in visualization, scientific computing, and image analysis. The overarching research objective of the SCI Institute is to create new scientific computing techniques, tools, and systems that enable solutions to important problems in biomedicine, science, and engineering. For more information: www.sci.utah.edu
• The School of Computing (until 2000 the Department of Computer Science)
  • The School of Computing has a long history of distinguished faculty and alumni who have made substantial contributions to research and industry. For more information: www.cs.utah.edu/school/history. The CUDA Center will play a key role in the School's new Digital Media Initiative linking Computing with Fine Art and Film and funded by the USTAR Initiative
• Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (CSAFE)
  • As one of the Department of Energy's five Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) centers, Utah runs detailed simulations of high energy devices and hydro-carbon fires, designed to increase the safety of dangerous material transportation and storage.

"The synergy of graphics combined with computational horsepower provided by NVIDIA GPUs and the CUDA programming environment provides incredible opportunities in science, industry and commerce," stated Dr. Steven Parker, adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Utah and principal research scientist at NVIDIA.

"The worlds of scientific computing and computer graphics owe a great deal to the University of Utah and those who have passed through its halls," said David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA. "CUDA technology has the potential to truly transform industries, as we have already seen in fields such as medicine, geophysics and finance. With a school of Utah's caliber incorporating it into their curriculum and across many of its research facilities, I am personally very excited to see what advances can be made."

The CUDA Center of Excellence at the University of Utah will be using GPU technology to make significant advances in a number of scientific applications, including seismic data processing and visualization, MRI and diffusion tensor image reconstruction, cardiac electrical wave propagation simulation, combustion and fluid dynamics simulation, and several projects in large-scale scientific visualization.

About University of Utah

With a rich 151-year history, the University of Utah's mission of teaching, research and service lives through its people and purposes. From its beautiful campus in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City, the university reaches out to its diverse student body from all 29 Utah counties, all 50 states and 102 countries with top-rated academic departments, competitive athletics, wide-ranging cultural offerings, and innovative medical programs. In 2005 the University established the office of Technology Venture Development to accelerate the entrepreneurial spirit at the University. Since then, 61 companies have been launched from University technologies.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro® products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. NVIDIA's inaugural NVISION 08 conference will be held August 25-27, 2008 in San Jose, California. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com and www.nvision08.com.