GPU-Assisted Scatterplots for Millions of Call Events

Abstract

With four percent of the working population employed in call centers in both the United States and the UK, the contact center industry represents a sizable proportion of modern industrial landscapes. As with most modern industries, data collection is de rigueur, producing gigabytes of call records that require analysis. The scatterplot is a well established and understood form of data visualization dating back to the 17th century. In this paper we present an application for visualizing large call centre data sets using hardware-accelerated scatterplots. The application utilizes a commodity graphics card to enable visualization of a month's worth of data, enabling fast filtering of multiple attributes. Filtering is implemented using the Open Computing Language (OpenCL), providing significant performance improvement over traditional methods. We demonstrate the value of our application for exploration and analysis of millions of call events from a real-world industry partner. Domain expert feedback from our industrial partners is reported.