In October 2008 I had the pleasure of being the external examiner for Mr. Geoffrey Ellis a PhD student of Professor Alan Dix in the Department of Computing at Lancaster University UK. Over the course of a long day Geoff gave a robust and excellent defence of his work which is ground breaking with regard to the understanding of clutter, its understanding, measurement and removal. Professor Alan Dix will be in Dublin December 2008 for the Launch of Irish Chapter of ACM SIGCHI where he will present its Inaugural Lecture.
Category Archives: infovis
Sept 2008 VAST Challenge committee travel grant to Mike Farrugia
Mike Farrugia won an award for his submission to the IEEE VAST research contest. As part of this he will be presenting in the USA next month.
Animating Multivariate Dynamic Social Networks Node-Link Animation (Cell Phone mini challenge) – Michael Farrugia, Aaron Quigley
The VAST Challenge committee chairs have also awarded him a travel grant to support his attendance at the conference from the NSF SEMVAST (Scientific Evaluation Methods for Visual Analytics Science and Technology) grant. This is a great achievement for a graduate student holding down a full time job and working on his graduate studies part time. Kudos to Mike and his employers for supporting his time with this.
Aug 2008 VAST 2008 and congrats to Mike Farrugia
Congratulations to Mike Farrugia one of my MSc students as he is one of the VAST 2008 Challenge Award Winners. His node-link animation submission to the contest was given one of these awards due to the “innovative visualizations, excellent analysis, and outstanding functionality demonstrated in the visual analytic environments” shown. Congrats Mike! More details here when I get them.
June 2008 VGV08 and Congrats to Mike Bennett
Irish Graduate Student Symposium on
Vision, Graphics and Visualisation(VGV08)
June 5th
Trinity College Dublin
On the back of an IRCSET exploratory Graduate Research Education Program
exploratory grant myself and colleagues in Dublin City University and Trinity
College Dublin organised VGV08
in June 2008. Our aim was to provide a stimulating space for young
researchers and Ph.D. students to present the results of their research
and to interact with their scientific peers, in a friendly and constructive environment.
One of my postgrads Mike Bennett received the best poster award at this event and
was presented with an award for his poster “Understanding Distance & How Humans
See Interfaces & Designs” from one of our industrial partners.
Thanks to Trinity College Dublin and Gerard Lacey for the lions share of the
organisation on this! It was a great atmosphere and very interesting to see the
work on display. I look forward to following up with students on quadruped animation and
large graph drawing. Thanks also to Gerry for allowing a number of our
ODCSSS research summer interns to attend.
Given the wealth of research across Ireland in Vision, Graphics and Visualisation
I hope this becomes an annual event for academics, graduate students and industry
partners alike! Roll on 2009!
May 2008 Paper Accepted IV08: Structural Clustering
Gaudin A. and Quigley A., “Interactive Structural Clustering of Graphs based on Multi-Representations”, 12th International Conference on Information Visualisation IV08, 9 – 11 July 2008 in LSBU, London, UK (to appear)
Work based on Marie Curie International Re-Integration Grant. CoViAn: Comparative Visual Analytic techniques (e.g. structure plot, city plot and graph drawing) and their effectiveness in the exploration of large scale relational data sets. This research project operated at the junction of two sub-topics, namely large-scale relational information visualisation (graph drawing) and visual analytics. The aim was to build on our own research and existing research in these fields, and to provide a targeted comparison of three contrasting views of relational data display and exploration. Our hypothesis which we have proven through our empirical research, is simply that graph drawing techniques alone, for the exploration and navigation of large graphs are not sufficient and that a hybrid approach which incorporates multiple views of the data should be taken.
May 2008 Paper Accepted AVI 2008: Perceptual Usability
Bennett M. and Quigley A., “Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences”, 9th International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI2008) Naples Italy May 2008
Jan 2008 Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization – Next Steps
Since 2005 I have been teaching a Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization (COMP40340) course in UCD as part of our Higher Diploma/M.Sc. in Ubiquitous and Multimedia Systems. I inherited this course from a colleague and while I have made some in-roads in the attention to algorithmic details and practical issues in the realisation of Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization it has remained relatively unchanged. This is now changing from 2008 onwards.
Students wishing to take my COMP40610 Computer Science: Information Visualisation course should attend this course where they will be given assignments and research reading distinct from the COMP40340 cohort. However, the core course material will remain the same. Classes are from 3-5pm each Wed.
 Algorithm animation of a 3D force directed layout of DWA512 (Matrix Market) built as an interactive VRML animation. |
I intend this new course to focus on Information Visualisation as the driver for the exploration of issues in Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization. I aim to equip the students with a solid grounding in mathematical and algorithmic details while ensuring they can rapidly deliver applied visual tools for exploring voluminous data sets (using the Processing framework which I will cover). |
| The old course drew on the following texts. Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice by Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes. Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke the VRML 2.0 Sourcebook by Andrea L. Amea, David R. Nadeau and John Moreland. Graph Drawing: Algorithms for the Visualization of Graphs by Giuseppe Di Battista, Peter Eades, Roberto Tamassia, Ioannis G. Tollis, Information Visualization : Perception for Design by Colin Ware and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative; Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte. |
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 Circular 3D tree-map of a hard disc. |
This update to the course takes an innovative approach to the teaching of Information Visualisation in terms of Multimedia, Graphics and Visualization principles. In the teaching and applied learning in this course we will adopt a version of the SECI model(Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995) for knowledge creation. While we will not labour under the SECI model it does provide a framework for identifying a series of check points and guides to the delivery, discussion, active learning and knowledge formation required by students in this course. |
| In practice we will weekly engage in a seven times through a two week cycle consisting or a series of activities in learning about core concepts in Information Visualisation.
Information Visualisation is typically driven by the need to identify questions. We will achieve this through an open-forum with questions and answers, brainstorming, peer work or team work (Socialisation). This forms the tacit to tacit SECI step. Next the course lecturer will engage in a period of tacit to explicit knowledge transfer, helping to convert the tacit ideas discussed earlier into explicit ideas and concepts (including code, mathematical and algorithmic details, infovis methods etc.). This forms the Externalisation step in the SECI model. The next two steps require active student learning and require more time for reflection on the work in the Socialisation and Externalisation steps. A dedicated time for the Combination of the knowledge presented with a specific end-user task is needed. Weekly practical sessions guided by a domain expert or other will aid the students in combining knowledge. Finally, by combining knowledge in this way with a clear task in mind students will start the process of Internalisation whereby explicit knoweldge becomes tacit. |
 A visual timeline of Winston Churchill’s life, divided into years, months, weeks and days presented on “Lifeline”, a fifteen metre-long interactive table in the Churchill Museum London. |
 Population movement visualisation from “From Migrations to Population Concentration”, Gaudin B., Bennett M., Sheehan B. & Quigley A., Best Poster IBM Dublin CASCON 2006 |
Be attempting to complete this SECI process a number of times (spiral) during this module we aim to move the students up through a series of levels whereby evermore advanced information visualisation concepts are conveyed and realised through practical work.
The students will explore the problem inherent in trying to visually display and explore voluminous data sets from sources including web navigation, books, papers/citations, game scores, scientific data, biological data, shopping data, social networks, stock/finance data and news sources. Along with considering the pipeline model of information visualisation we will explore more iterative models dealing with data capture, modeling, filtering, management, processing, refinement, representation and interaction. Students will learn from both research papers and in-class lecture material covering multi-dimensional data, geographical data, biological data, time series data, relational data and methods such as scatter plots, graph drawings and tree layouts. |
Reference books for this course include:
Visualizing Data by Ben Fry
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think Written and edited by Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman
Processing A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas and Ben Fry
July 2007 New Papers [Ross Shannon]
The students in my group have been publishing a number of a new papers of late.
Ross Shannon has had two papers accepted in recent months, one on collecting and reasoning about context data from sensors in the environment and another on visualising communications in ad-hoc networks. “Towards Scatterbox: a Context-Aware Message Forwarding Platform”, to be presented at MRC 07 at Context 07, presents ongoing work from our group in designing reasoning frameworks that can collate and reason about large amounts of context data gleaned from a wide range of sensors in a smart environment. In this case we have designed a system that decides to forward only relevant emails to a user’s mobile device, where their attention should only be drawn to important messages.
The second paper, “Visualising Network Communications to Evaluate a Data Dissemination Method for Ubiquitous Systems” presents a novel visualisation application useful for designers of ubiquitous systems to be presented at Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation 2007 in September. As these systems will generally be designed to use ad-hoc networks of heterogeneous devices, many of which will join and leave the network
constantly, the stability of the data within the network is crucially important. The visualisation depicts an evolving network topology, which draws attention to nodes which have not passed their data to
other nodes in the system, thus making them more at risk of data loss if they leave the network before passing on this information. The visualisation can thus be used as an aid to the designer of the
communication protocol to view the emergent behaviours of their data dissemination algorithm.
July 2007 Graduate Programme in Visualisation, Graphics and Vision (VGV)
In the first week of July 2007 a group of academics from the three Dublin-based universities – Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, and Dublin City University led by Prof. Carol O’Sullivan submitted a GREP application for a Graduate Programme in Visualisation, Graphics and Vision (VGV) to IRCSET. This was the culmination, in funding terms, of over 18 months collective effort involving visits to 30 international sites and an in depth local marketing survey. In research and academic terms, this is but one of the first steps to the establishment of an international leading graduate program.
“This graduate research education programme on Visualisation, Graphics and Vision (VGV) will combine the international research track records of leading academics from TCD, UCD and DCU in the highly complementary thematic areas of graphics, animation, vision, image engineering, visualisation and simulation. The program is built around a networked virtual campus, that facilitates leading world-class research, industry engagement, inter-disciplinary collaboration and the development of a student cohort with industrially relevant research skills.”
Now that the grant application has gone in we hope to move onto the development of the recruitment and hiring process for a student intake in Sept/Oct 2007 along with starting our program in the small with the expectation we can ramp up as suitable funds become available.
June 2007 Expert Panel Visualisation, Graphics and Vision
On June 16, 2007 we had an expert panel review our proposed inter-University graduate program in Visualisation, Graphics and Vision. Academics from the three Dublin-based universities – Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, and Dublin City University presented. Representatives from all three organisations attended and the proposal and its background were presented to the panel under the following headings:
- Introduction to Team and panel members.
- Vision: research goals, scientific rationale
- Context: current Irish system; graduate education and funding environment, esp. current IRCSET calls
- Research: overview of current research and graduate education activities of team Infrastructure: facilities, equipment and services available in the three institutions
- Best Practice: presentation and discussion by team members on outputs of visits to international centres of excellence
- Industry Liaison: planned industry involvement and market research undertaken
- Programme: detailed presentation of the contents of the proposed programme, including taught modules, structures and governance
The expert panel provided us detailed feedback in terms of:
- Funding
- Recruitment/Advertising
- Admissions
- Courses/Modules
- Governance
- Evaluation
The panel said they were very impressed with the calibre of the programme team, which consists of high-quality, well-respected researchers with international reputations in the fields of visualisation, graphics and vision. They particularly liked the complementary expertise within the team, the range of ages and experience, and the interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborative spirit and enthusiasm that was evident from the presentations and discussions at the meeting. The panel believes that this programme will be novel and ground-breaking, and could serve as an example for future such programs internationally.
Based on this experience, our industrial survey and visits to over 30 institutions internationally we are planning a submission to IRCSET under their up coming call for full GREPs.
