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Fall 2008
VISUALIZATION FRIDAY FORUM
Fridays 12-1pm LSRC D106
Lunch Served
September 5 - Introducing the Friday Forum
Rachael Brady
Visualization Technology Group
I like to start each semester off with an overview/welcome talk. Today I will discuss some projects that happened through the VTG group over the summer, such as the LINK Media Wall (Steve Feller), an Avatar Creation Ensemble (Wayne Godwin/Oriana Wen), a DiVE experience for teaching Chemistry (Shelly Bloom/Marcel Yang), and soundSpace (Scott Lindroth/Steve Feller) an Installation at the Museum of Life and Science.
September 12 -Smart Surfaces and Smart Spaces for Smart Homes
Matt Reynolds
ECE
With the recent emergence of affordable, large, high resolution displays for the home, we can now easily imagine table scale and wall scale displays that interact with room occupants in a variety of different application contexts beyond simple movie and photo playback. The "Microsoft Surface" interactive table is perhaps the best publicized recent example of an interactive surface appropriate for home use, but there are a variety of interesting approaches for table scale and room scale interaction beyond the camera based approaches used by Microsoft. I will present some examples from my own work and that of colleagues showing a variety of sensing technologies that enable large interactive displays, as well as some of the novel interfaces that have been developed on top of those platforms.
see a video of the talk (the actual talk starts 12 minutes into the recording)
September 19-Everybody's doing it: web-based visualizations and mashups in the social sciences
Shawn Miller
Center for Instructional Technology
Last year, the Center for Instructional Technology provided grants for faculty interested in more deeply pursuing the addition of visualizations to their teaching. Many of the projects CIT funded also had a strong impact on the research faculty have been doing. Web2.0 visualization tools and sites (Google Earth/Maps, Many Eyes, etc) have made the creation of data-driven visualizations more readily available, less complicated, and more easily embedded into public websites, in turn making them more attractive to researchers with only a casual or passive interest in visualization. In this talk, I'll show examples of a few of the technologies (such as Google Earth/Maps and MIT's SIMILE project) used in recent social science projects at Duke and discuss both the positive impact and pitfalls of using them.
see a video of the talk (the actual talk starts 20 minutes into the recording)
Link to sites described in Shawn's talk
September 26-Monitoring Spring from Satellites
Jennifer Swenson
Nicholas School of the Environment
The green flush of spring is readily observable from space. Near daily satellites provide wall-to-wall images of the variable patterns of spring green-up over space and time. Once patterns of spring onset and duration are characterized, we can begin to examine environmental variables that influence spring onset for a given year and a particular place (e.g. days since last freeze, soil temperature, topography). This NASA-funded project examines spring patterns in North Carolina in the context of climate change's potential influence on earlier spring onset dates and an extended growing season, potentially altering ecosystem productivity.
see a video of this talk (talk starts about 13 minutes into the recording)
October 3 - Transdisciplinary Research - Building Bridging Languages
Bill Seaman
Art, Art History, Visual Studies
We have often spoken of interdisciplinary research in the past. In transdisciplinary research, a series of disciplines are bridged. Because no singular discipline or history of that discipline can be used to articulate the emergent work that is arising, the term transdisciplinary is used, suggesting that such research goes beyond any individual discipline or coupling of disciplines. Transdisciplinary research brings a set of disciplines together in the service of new forms of poetic expression and emergent knowledge production. Often such research involves new approaches to technology, interactivity and computational paradigms.
I have been working on a number of collaborations since 1980. This includes projects involving Scientists,Computer Programmers, Designers, Artists, Dancers, Choreographers, Musicians, Media Theorists, Architects, and Students. I will discuss the research that I am exploring which involves transdisciplinary collaboration and I will show relevant materials to outline some of these projects - some completed and some still in progress. I will also discuss the potentially valuable nature of projects with very long-term research goals.
see a video of this talk (talk starts about 7 minutes into the recording)
October 10 - Introducing the Multitouch Wall
Xunlei Wu
Duke RENCI Center
The new Duke-RENCI Center on the first floor of the OIT-Telecommunications Building features a 13-foot X 5-foot Multi-Touch Visualization Wall that was developed in-house by a team of RENCI staff scientists. This forum will focus on the development of high-resolution touch-sensitive displays, and the role that gesture-based interaction can play in research and discovery.
The Forum will begin a bit early (12:05) to allow time to walk over to the RENCI Center and view a demonstration of the Wall.
October 17 - Forensic Facial Reconstruction- Adding detail, keeping it honest
Andrea Stevenson-Won
Biomodal LLC and Visualization Technology Group
Reconstructing the face of an unidentified person from their skull is a
staple of museum display and crime lab dramatizations. But the more
"realistic" a portrait based solely on the skull becomes, the further away
it drifts from being a accurate representation of the individual in life.
A useful reconstruction for identification purposes is a less detailed
representation with purposeful ambiguity. How can museums and other
institutions use new techniques in visualization to create detailed
reconstructions in their displays without misleading?
see a video of the talk . (The talk begins about 15 minute into the video)
October 24 - Spectral imaging using a coded aperture snapshot spectral imager
Ashwin Wagadarikar
ECE
Spectral imaging is a method to capture a three dimensional datacube of
information where the two dimensional spatial image obtained from a regular
camera is complemented with spectral information at every pixel. Unlike
conventional spectral imagers that require temporal scanning to capture a
datacube, our novel coded aperture snapshot spectral imagers (CASSI) are
able to recover a spectral image from just one snapshot, two dimensional,
coded projection of the three dimensional datacube. We will present the
design and reconstruction algorithm for a single disperser-CASSI prototype,
before demonstrating its application to video rate spectral imaging of a
fast changing scene.
We recorded the video (see here ), but Ashwin did not have the microphone on, so there is no sound.
October 31 - Dynamic Optic Nerve Compliance Measurement Using SD-OCT
Stuart McKinnon
Ophthalmology
The biomechanical properties of the optic nerve head may play an important role in the development of glaucoma. Using spectral domain ocular coherence tomography (SD-OCT), we can obtain volume scans of the optic nerve head at various applied pressures. Displacement maps of the optic nerve head surface are then created using ImageJ and Amira. Showing a quantitative difference in compliance between normal and glaucoma patients may provide a novel tool for earlier diagnosis of glaucoma.
November 7 - Visualizing El Nino: Using real data, but simplifying to communicate the essence.
Taichiro Sakagami
Nicholas School of the Environment
El Nino is one example of a kind of climate variability that is well understood by a small group of scientists, but very poorly understood by educated citizens. I believe visualization technology is one method that could help dissseminate current scientific knowlege about El Nino to the educated public. Over the last year I have created an animation that's ment to communicate the essence of El Nino phenomenon. This talk will cover my experience in this process and illustrate the steps of creating the animation. Of course, I will also show the current version of my El Nino animation.
Animations can be viewed here.
November 14 - Highlights from the 2008 Vis Conference
Eric Monson
Visualization Technology Group
The IEEE Visualization conference is a weeklong event which includes Scientific Visualization, InfoVis and Visual Analytics. Instead of trying to give you an overview of what was presented there last month, I will focus on a couple topics I found particularly interesting. First, I will cover the large group of new classes which researchers at Sandia National Labs have recently added to VTK (the Visualization Toolkit) to handle InfoVis, including graphs (networks), graph algorithms, new data structures and geovis. Next, I will briefly demonstrate an InfoVis tool from IBM research, Word Tree, which is used to visualize and explore text, somewhat like a tag cloud, while preserving the context of the words in the document. Finally, if there is time, I will show a couple interesting entries from the InfoVis Art Show.
see a video of the talk (talk starts 10 minutes into the video)
November 21 - Mapping and Visualization for Marine Biogeography, a Community Approach
Ben Best
Nicholas School of the Environment
Our ocean's biodiversity is disappearing before even being discovered and described. The Census of Marine Life (coml.org), a 10-year scientific initiative with a global network of scientists in more than 80 nations, are assessing the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans, for final release in 2010. As part of this massive synthesis effort, a team based at Duke (comlmaps.org) is developing mapping and visualization tools and capacity across the Census projects for the purposes of scientific discovery, decision management, education and outreach.
This talk will show highlights from a recent workshop we hosted. Visually intuitive and reproducible scientific workflows will enable researchers to easily fetch biological and environmental data, construct phylogenies mapped in space, model species richness and habitat, and project into past and future climates. Geotagged multimedia content will be aggregated across projects using RSS feeds for touring with Google Maps and Google Earth. Community-based spatial feedback on species ranges, model predictions, and management areas could be updated through the browser with internet mapping technologies. Potential interplay with related Duke technology from NESCent, RENCI and the DiVE will be mentioned, collaborations welcome.
*This is joint work with Patrick Halpin, El Fujioka, and Ben Donnelly
see a video of the talk (talk starts 10 minutes into video)
November 28 - Thanksgiving
December 5 - Virtual Peace
Tim Lenoir
ISIS
The Humanitarian Assistance Training Simulator brings together digital learning technologies and international humanitarian assistance efforts. Students and educators enter an immersive, multi-sensory game-based environment that simulates actual disaster relief and conflict resolution conditions in order to learn first-hand the necessary tools for sensitive and timely crisis response. We will demo the game-based learning environment and discuss the role of Duke CS students and faculty in building it.
For more information, please contact Rachael Brady
Organized by The Visualization Technology Group (VTG),
Sponsored by Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS)