Software for the 4th Dimension

Computerworld - What do the death of a fruit fly cell and the rise and fall of a stock's price have in common?
Both things happen incrementally over time, says Harry Hochheiser, a computer science graduate research assistant at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Using conventional data mining tools, finding patterns of cell death and stock performance or any other time-series data has been difficult.
Hochheiser's TimeFinder software has a visual interface that lets users manipulate simple graphical tools to query huge databases and then lets them see the results represented on a graph.
One mouse click replaces the typing of multiple parameters, reducing procedure time and the chance of introducing errors.
A user clicks the mouse to draw a box on an empty graph with defined axes, say, with time on the X axis and stock price on the Y. Thus, the user poses a query, such as, "Show me all stocks with prices between $50 and $75 at the end of last September." A second window then shows a list of each stock that meets that criterion.
By drawing more boxes, a user can refine his query to get only stocks whose prices then rose 50% by January and fell by 75% by March.
Andrew Woelflein, a London-based financial analyst, recently saw the software demonstrated. "This is great," he says. "With this, I could query the data directly. Right now, this is the kind of query you submit to the analysts, and they get back to you in maybe a day. You change the parameters, then it's another day. With this, I could get the answer immediately."
To build TimeFinder, Hochheiser used Jazz, an open-source software development kit that was built on the Java2D application programming interface and created at the university's Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
"Harry's work is a great example of the improved visual interface that lets a novice perform at the level of an expert," says Hochheiser's adviser, Ben Shneiderman, the laboratory's founding director and a leader in visual interface design.
Working with Shneiderman, Hochheiser is still developing TimeFinder. He demonstrates a feature he's recently added to the software that lets users superimpose results for comparison. The lines representing performance of most of the stocks follow a similar path. One peak stands out much higher than the others.
"Presenting the information visually allows for serendipity," Hochheiser says. He points out the spike - with conventional data mining tools, there would be no way you'd know about this stock. But now that you know about it, he