[Infovis] Call for Participation: GD Contest 2022 with Remote Live Challenge

[Philipp Kindermann]

Dear Information Visualizers,

the 30th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network 
Visualization will take (hopefully) place in Tokyo, Japan, from 
September 13 to 16, 2022. As has been tradition since 1994, the 
symposium will be accompanied by a Graph Drawing Contest, allowing all 
community members to demonstrate their graph drawing skills in a fun 
competitive setting. Due to the uncertainty regarding future travel and 
physical meeting restrictions caused by the Corona virus outbreak, the 
contest will be either held completely online or in a hybrid format. 
Details of the exact format of the contest will be announced around the 
Graph Drawing submission deadline. The contest has two parts: the 
Creative Topics and the Live Challenge.


1) Live Challenge

Following popular tradition, a live challenge will be held the day 
before the symposium in a format similar to a typical programming 
contest. Teams are presented with a collection of challenge graphs and 
have approximately one hour to submit their highest scoring drawings. 
This year, the challenge focuses on

         minimizing the planar polyline edge-length ratio on a fixed grid.

Teams may either draw the graphs manually (manual category), or use 
their own customized tools (automatic category). Remote participation 
will be possible for both the manual and the automatic category.
The live challenge will take place during the conference.
To solve the instances and submit your solutions, you will be provided 
with a dedicated tool:

     https://graphdrawingcontest.appspot.com/tool.jsp

Note that the target function changed slightly compared to last year, 
but the tool has not been updated yet for the new function.
For more details, visit

     http://graphdrawing.org/gdcontest/contest2022/challenge.html


2) Creative Topics

For your entertainment and inspiration, we have composed two nice graphs 
that you may draw with full artistic freedom.

1. Opera Network
The data represents a collection of opera performances that took place 
across Europe between 1775 and 1833. The data was extracted from the 
RISM database (https://opac.rism.info/main-menu-/kachelmenu/data) and 
was offered by Frans Wiering - professor of Utrecht University studing 
Musicology. There are several possibilities on how a network can be 
extracted from this data. We leave it to the participants to decide how 
and whether to model this data set as a network.

2. Aesthetic Experience Network
The data set represents 8 networks that model an aesthetic experience of 
the viewers when observing artworks. The analyzed artworks are 8 
paintings by Klee, Kandinsky, Mortensen, Miro and Winter. Each of the 14 
nodes represents one of the two polarities of an aesthetic effect, and 
the edges are weighted by conditional dependence relations among 
aesthetic effects.

In both cases, you may visualize the graph in any way you like. 
Submissions will be judged on a list of criteria that includes, but is 
not limited to, readability, aesthetics, novelty, and design quality. 
The weighting of the criteria might be different for the two graphs.
Submissions will be handled through EasyChair.
For more details, visit

     http://graphdrawing.org/gdcontest/contest2022/topics.html

Submission deadline: September 05 (23:59 PDT)


3) Awards

We are hoping to be able to award a monetary prize to up to three 
submissions in each of the four different categories. Details will follow.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

Best regards,
the Graph Drawing Contest Committee,
Philipp Kindermann, Tamara Mchedlidze, and Wouter Meulemans