Cancer Center 3D Network Graph

By Pete Pascuzzi and Lovepreet Singh

The visualization shows the network of collaboration in publications among faculty members in Cancer Center. The visualization used Three.js to create a 3D network graph for the same. The spheres shows an individual faculty member. The size of the sphere corresponds to the total number of publications the faculty member has -- the more the publications, the bigger the size. The visualization uses a modification of the original 'force' layout provided by d3 visualization library[1]. This layout is configured to try to keep faculty members with more publications towards the center and those with fewer publications away from center. The edges connect faculty members having atleast 1 co-publications. The thickness of an edge corresponds to the number of co-publications for the connected faculty members. Again, the visualization tries to place faculty members with more co-publications nearby, but that may always not be the case depending on other forces. Clicking on a sphere corresponding to a faculty member highlights all other faculty members that have co-publications with the former. The clicking process may be repeated in chain to highlight connected faculty members as necessary. On highlighting a faculty member, the edges are labelled with the number of co-publications that the connected faculty members have.
[1] - https://github.com/vasturiano/d3-force-3d