Visual notation for GraphBLAS operations

[szarnyasg]

Some thoughts on visualizing GraphBLAS operations in presentations.

Masks

Masks -- it might be worth making a distinction between〈M〉and〈¬M〉:

• regular mask: highlight elements which are to be computed with some background color, e.g. light grey
• complement of a mask: cross out matrix elements (×) where the computation should not be performed.

The rationale behind this distinction is that is we would use the same for〈¬M〉, that would often mean highlighting most of the matrix.

Additionally:

• replace mask: It should suggest that the elements outside the mask are deleted. This is often quite obvious visually so maybe just adding a note 'replace' could suffice.

Highlight elements

If using colors is possible, we can use circles with borders.

Lessons learnt

I've used Wingdings to capture circled numbers but it had a few problems:

• Changing from the basic state to a highlighted state is time-consuming as it is a different character.
• For the same reason, animated highlights also do not work.

Using regular numbers in a circle is a better approach.