Ed Champness gave this presentation at the ACS Spring 2017 National Meeting & Exposition held in San Diego, USA.

Abstract

We often use the term “data visualisation” to refer to the creation of plots that enable us to represent tables of numbers in an easily-digestible form and yet we use many visual approaches for representing compounds, targets, assay results, model predictions, etc. The combination of these varied representations, containing many dimensions of data, presents us with an interesting challenge as we seek to understand what they are telling us and then convey our conclusions to others. Something to keep in mind is that while we may keep our social and professional lives separate, the boom in social media is a pretty clear indicator about the way we like to consume information, and there’s no reason this should change just because we walk through the office door. While it is easy to simplify the overall picture by simply trimming off the detail, how can we ensure that the “bite-sized visualisation” we ultimately create is an appropriate reflection of the underlying information such that it won’t inappropriately bias our decisions? We will illustrate some of the ways that we can achieve this and discuss visual methods to guide our decisions in drug discovery.

You can download this presentation as a PDF.