Message from the general and paper chairs

The IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Conference continues to develop and grow. Each year brings new researchers to the field and produces important advances in the theory and practice of visual analytics. VAST is now in its seventh year, and it is the third year as an IEEE Conference. The presented work demonstrates significant growth and maturation of the visual analytics community. We received 104 submissions and were able to accept 30 papers into the program. The conference program reflects the breadth of research in the visual analytics community. Paper sessions cover such areas as foundations of the analysis process; tree, network and social network analysis; support for sensemaking and collaborative analysis; visual computational analysis of multivariate data; space and time; and many applications of visual analytics capabilities such as in the biomedical field, risk management, text and document analysis. To select this year's program, an international program committee of 35 experts carefully considered and reviewed the papers through a two-cycle review process instituted this year. Each paper was assigned to a primary and a secondary reviewer from this committee. The primary and secondary reviewers assigned one more tertiary reviewer to each paper so that at least four reviews were provided for all papers. Based on these reviews, the paper chairs selected the papers conditionally first. The primary reviewer had to evaluate the revised papers carefully in the second review cycle. Finally, the paper chairs accepted 30 papers and organized the program sessions. We are grateful to the International Program Committee and the reviewers for their contributions to a successful review process.