Navigation
Spring 2008
VISUALIZATION FRIDAY FORUM
Fridays 12-1pm LSRC D106
Lunch Served
January 18 - Interesting Visualization Resources
Rachael Brady
Visualization Technology Group
I like to start each semester off with an overview/welcome talk. Today I'd like to show off a few very nice visualization website resources, make you aware of some competitions, and show some interesting visualizations that I saw during the IEEE Visualization conference.
Look here for a list of the websites discussed at today's talk.
see a video of the talk
January 25 - ChucK: A Programming Language for Music; Visualizations for Sound Synthesis and Audio Programming
Ge Wang
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford
We present ChucK, a new programming language intended to provide 1) a different approach to express time and parallelism, and 2) a new platform for precise and rapid experimentation of computer audio for composition, performance, and education in CS/Music. The basic tenets of ChucK include a syntax for representing audio flow, a new time-based programming model that allows developers to precisely control time across parallel program components (we call this "strongly-timed"), and facilities to rapidly experiment with audio programs "on-the-fly" (i.e., as they run). A ChucKian approach to "on-the-fly programming" as a new musical performance paradigm is also discussed, which in turn motivates the Audicle: a specialized graphical environment to visualize ChucK programs (as well as the audio programming process) in real-time.
In addition, we look at ChucK/Audicle as a primary instrument-building and teaching tool in new computer-mediated ensembles and classrooms such as the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and (soon) the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk), and some of the software instruments visualizations we've built. This demo-driven presentation chronicles our adventure in designing a new computer music language "from the ground up" and examining the essential (and fun) role visualization has played throughout. All audiences welcome.
see a video of the talk
February 1 - Constructal theory : the origin of design in nature
Adrian Bejan
Mechanical Engineering & Material Science
Constructal theory is the mental viewing that the widespread occurrence of "designedness" in nature is a universal phenomenon, a phenomenon of physics, which is summarized by the constructal law: "for a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides easier access to its currents". With the constructal law we achieve two things: we explain and predict natural flow patterns, and we design effective configurations of devices for human use. The lecture makes four points: Pattern in nature is flow (live system), Complexity is simple, Pattern is mental viewing, and Use it or lose it, i.e. visual communication has always been essential in science education and research.
For more information see http://www.contructal.org/
A. Bejan, Shape and Structure, from Engineering to Nature, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
A. Bejan, Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics, 3rd ed., Wiley, 2006.
see a video of the talk
February 8 - Scientific Graphics with Adobe Illustrator: Beyond the basics
Eric Monson
Visualization Technology Group
Last semester (see the October 19, 2007 Friday Forum) I went over the rudiments of using Adobe Illustrator, a vector graphics editing program which can be a very valuable tool for scientists and engineers, but which some people avoid because of its seemingly steep learning curve. In this followup lecture/demonstration, I will apply those basic techniques and show more in-depth practical examples of using Illustrator to enhance graphs and create diagrams for scientific manuscripts, proposals and talks.
see a video of the talk
February 15th - HarambeeNet: Social Networks as an Introduction to Computer Science
Jeffrey Forbes
Computer Science
Despite exponential increases in computational power, examples used in computer science courses have remained largely unchanged and enrollment have seen a recent marked decline. The goal of the HarambeeNet project is to bring educators together to design modules that introduce computer science into existing courses in various disciplines in a way that increases interest for pursuing further study in computer science. We have chosen the Science of Networks as the overarching theme and Social Networks as our immediate focus on which to develop materials and modules that form an alternative introduction to computer science. One reason for choosing this theme is its roots in mathematics, computer science, sociology, and operations research. Another reason is that the topic grounds abstract concepts in a concrete setting immediately familiar, relevant, and intriguing to college students. After surveying the relevant literature, network analysis and visualization tools, sources of data, and curricular materials, the faculty learning community is developing and evaluating modules that can be incorporated into existing courses in math, statistics, computer science, sociology, economics, and related fields. In this talk, I will discuss the current status of our project: highlighting trends in networks courses and demonstrating a module that utilizes our adaptation of a network analysis and visualization tool and web-based social network to analyze user's music listening profiles.
see a video of the talk
February 22 -Creating and Sharing Digital Media in Second Life and Croquet: Current Projects and Future Directions
Victoria Szabo
ISIS
Last summer the ISIS Program bought an island in Second Life in order to explore how a well developed virtual world environment could benefit digital project-based undergraduate education. At the same time as we have explored Second Life, we have also continued to explore other opportunities for virtual world building and archive development in the Croquet platform. This talk demonstrates projects underway in the Duke ISIS Oasis in Second Life, touches the surface of what Croquet might offer to extend that functionality, and looks ahead to possible directions for virtual world building activities within the ISIS curriculum and beyond.
February 29 - Studying and Communicating the Structure and Evolution of Science
Katy Borner
Indiana University
This seminar is co-sponsored by NESCent, and located in their facility at Ninth Street and Main Street, Erwin Mill Building, 2024 W. Main Street, Suite A200. For more information, call 919-668-4551
Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind's explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by unknown monsters.
Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces, see http://scimaps.org, aim to serve today's explorers understanding and navigating the world of science. These maps are generated through scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly datasets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. They can be used to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, collections, grants, papers, journals, and ideas in a domain of interest. Local maps provide overviews of a specific area: its homogeneity, import-export factors, and relative speed. They allow one to track the emergence, evolution, and disappearance of topics and help to identify the most promising areas of research. Global maps show the overall structure and evolution of our collective scholarly knowledge.
This talk will present an overview of the techniques and cyber-technologies used to study science by scientific means together with sample science maps and their interpretations.
March 7 - A Series of Studies Using Virtual Reality as a Distraction to Mitigate Chemotherapy Symptoms
Susan M. Schneider
School of Nursing
Chemotherapy treatments are intense and difficult to endure and patients often have difficulty adhering to the prescribed schedule because of chemotherapy-related symptoms. Patients who successfully complete chemotherapy have a greater chance of non-recurrence and long-term quality of life. Thus, helping patients tolerate chemotherapy regimens is critical to their survival. Virtual reality provides a distracting environment, which is immersive, and blocks out competing stimuli. This presentation will discuss the results of a series of studies, which explored the feasibility of using virtual reality as a distraction intervention with a variety of adult and pediatric populations who were receiving chemotherapy for cancer.
March 14 - Spring Break
March 21 - An introduction to ParaView for scientific visualization
Eric Monson
Visualization Technology Group
ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform application built on top of VTK (the Visualization Toolkit) designed to visualize many types of data. It is build with a client-server architecture which allows it to be used on an individual workstation or laptop for small to medium sized data sets, or in parallel on a cluster for viewing very large-scale distributed data. In this talk I will introduce the basics of using ParaView in the context of visualizing data from simulations developed in Thomas Kepler's lab at the Duke University Laboratory of Computational Immunology. (ParaView is actively developed and supported by Kitware Inc, Sandia National Labs and CSimSoft, along with various other government and academic institutions -- http://www.paraview.org )
March 28 - Visualizing Contagion: Images of Disease Emergence in Mass Media
Priscilla Wald
English
Contagion has a long history, applying to ideas as well as germs and referring to the imperceptible circulation of both. Visualizing contagion is a powerful expression of expertise; images tell an important story about contagion. This talk will focus on the visualizing of contagion in accounts of newly surfacing diseases, which appeared in scientific publications and the mainstream media in the West with increasing frequency following the introduction of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the mid-1980s. They put the visual vocabulary of disease outbreak into circulation, and they introduced the concept of "emerging infections." While these accounts were neither monolithic, nor static, their repetition of images produced a formulaic set of visual conventions that proliferated in the mid-1990s. Collectively, they depicted what was implicit in all of the accounts: a fascination not just with the novelty and danger of the microbes, but also with the changing social formations of a shrinking world.
These images--and the stories they accompany--have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors and lifestyles, and they change economies. They also influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how we imagine the threat and why we react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others at least as dangerous and pressing, as well as which problems merit our attention and resources.
April 4 - Dimensionality in imaging systems
David Brady
Electrical Engineering
An image is an ordered list of data. The dimensionality of the order parameter and of the data are parameters that may be used in system design to improve the efficiency of image capture and display systems. This talk reviews the concept of dimensionality in imaging systems and describes some examples of the use of dimension in design.
April 11 - Embeddings of graphs and learning with random walks
Mauro Maggioni
Mathematics
Motivated by the study of high-dimensional data sets with intrinsic low-dimensional "manifold" structure, we will discuss random walks on data sets and graphs, and how these can be used to study geometric properties of data and to performing machine learning tasks. In particular, I will introduce a notion of heat coordinates (similar to GPS triangulation) on (undirected) graphs that (provably) allows to map large "almost-Euclidean" portions of a graph into low-dimensional Euclidean space, while "almost" preserving all pairwise distances, in a way that is robust to noise. We discuss the potential of this in view of visualization of large graphs, and human interaction in view of learning. I will also discuss how similar techniques can be used for machine learning tasks, with and without supervision.
April 18 - Desiring Structures: Exhibiting the Dendritic Form
Marius Kwint
University of Oxford
|
From 30 April to 4 September 2005, the Museum of Design in Zurich staged the exhibition 'Simply complex' ('einfach Komplex'), an exploration of the dendritic form. The dendritic form is a recurrent and often instructive one in the sciences, which can be observed in many contexts and at different scales, from the delta of liquid methane revealed by the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan in 2005, to micrographs of neurons in the human brain. It also recurs in the form of the persuasive diagrams which art historians, linguists and philosophers have long used to bring forth a sense of organic unity, order and development from their data. 'Simply complex' displayed case studies of these visual strategies in the sciences, while also showcasing some specially commissioned critical and aesthetic interventions by artists on the theme of the branching form. My talk will reflect on the conception and staging of the exhibition, and consider how the project might be developed in a scholarly direction in the future. |
 |
.
For more information, please contact Rachael Brady
Organized by The Visualization Technology Group (VTG),
Sponsored by Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS)