Name: Shuang Huang
Department: Statistics
Status: Third-year PhD student
Website: www.stat.wisc.edu/~huangs
I am new to visualization although I spend most of my researching time on playing with data. My interest in this field is to learn how to withdraw information from data effectively and efficiently, and then present to others clearly. The data I am working on is from geneticists, which are of huge quantity and sometimes messy. I wish I can learn skills to make data and statistical results easy to understand.
The softwares I am using are R, SAS and MATLAB. I used to program in C/C++ many years ago. Like most statistician, I would view myself as a tool user and domain scientist.
I am:
– at the School of Journalism, fourth year PhD student.
Interests:
– Mapping complex dynamics among social agents and media.
– Positioning emerging citizen journalism in specific forms of “media ecology”.
– Utilizing community network knowledge for journalism and community discourses.
* Currently working on agent-based models of media institution interactions for dissertation research.
* Currently working on the community journalism project “Madison Commons” as technical manager/developer with prof. Lew Friedland.
* Also partly involved in designing implementations for the community social network database “Community Knowledge Base”, which is being developed by prof. Lew Friedland.
Expectations:
– Find ideas to better visualize complex relational models (e.g. social networks) for academic and popular uses.
Skills:
– As for computing skills, server management experiences, some PHP and tiny bit JAVA(administrator-level, rather than programmer-level).
– Visualization tools I’ve used include network analysis programs such as UCINET and ORA, ABM programs such as NetLOGO.
My interest in the fields of spatial visualization and cartography stem from a background in graphic visualization for broad audiences. The role of effective visual communication has shaped my previous education and career which allowed me to recognize and appreciate the challenges within cartographic design.
After obtaining an undergraduate degree from the University of Montana in television production, I relocated to San Francisco to pursue a career as a 3D animator. I spent several years as an animator before moving to Seattle to start my own business designing digital content for broadcast and the internet. During that time I worked on several projects that required the creation of thematic maps, which lead to my interest in cartography.
I am currently pursuing a PhD in geography and my specific areas of interest are interactive and on-demand cartography and 3D visualization. My master’s thesis explored gesturing techniques for map navigation using multi-touch interfaces and I recently completed custom versions of the hardware and software.
For this class, I would like to rely on some of the programming languages that I already know (C#, ActionScript, Java, JavaScript, PHP) and also learn some new techniques for effective visualization. I would currently place myself between the ‘Designer’ and ‘Vis Scientist’ perspectives that we talked about in class.
At a glance:
- Adrian Mayorga
- 1st year grad student, Computer Sciences
- Focus: Computer Graphics
- Skills: C/C++, Java, C#, Scheme, Haskell
I am a first year grad student in the Department of Computer Sciences. My primary interest lies in computer graphics. Specifically, I am interested in improving how people create, and communicate ideas through computer graphics. When applied to visualization, I am interested in how information can be clearly mapped into a visual that is easily understood. If I were to place myself in the triangle I would be somewhere between Vis Scientist and Designer. There are two main things that I wish to get out of the class: 1) Have a broad understanding of the visualization community and the direction it is taking 2) Learn about the tools that are used to reason about, evaluate, and design good visualization tools.
Name : Chaman Singh Verma
Affiliation: Department of Computer Sciences
Website :
Current Status: First year Ph.D student.
Professional Interests:
***********************
Applied Computational Geometry specially in 3D mesh generation, large
scale parallel and distributed computing.
Before coming to UW for the graduate studies, I was working at Argonne
National Lab at Chicago in the field of Biomedical image processing and
3D reconstruction of human carotid arteries. The 3D models generated from
the images were used in computer simulation of carotid stenois. One of the
reason why I got involved in visualization area at ANL was because there were
not good tools to analyze terabytes of dataset generated by the largest and
fastest supercomputers in various research labs. It is widely accepted by the
scientists at these labs that unless there are tools to extract useful
information from these dataset, the aim of “Simulation as third Pillar of
Science” can not be achieved.
Before joining ANL, I worked for eight years for a Supercomputer manufacturing
company where my primary responsibilities were developing tools and benchmarkingHPC compilers, system software and end users applications.
Expectations:
************
I have great expectations from this class because of my frustrating experience
with analysis of 3D and higher dimensional datasets. It will be extremely
valuable to get some new insights into
1. Dimension reduction techniques.
2. Extremely large scale SVD and PCA techniques.
3. Efficient 3D Volume visualization techniques.
Skills: Primarily C/C++ with Parallel Programming using Message Passing Interface, multi-threading and, OpenMP. Recently started learning CUDA programming
language.
Hi all,
I’m Nate. In 2001, I graduated from here with a degree in Comp Sci. Afterwards, I spent a few years working at the Health Sciences Library, and a few years working at Wendt Library, gradually transitioning from a desktop support person to a web developer. Since then, I’ve moved to a brain imaging lab and now help build tools for scientists to use mainly in functional MRI studies. And in my spare time, I’m a co-founder of a small startup company, where we sell software for librarians to help in running and staffing a reference desk.
As far as my interest in vis goes, I’m very interested in learning to make tools for our researchers to better explore fMRI data — existing tools are of really low quality. I suppose this puts me on the midline between domain scientist and designer: I’m not going to discover any new principles of visualization, but I sure would like to learn to make better tools.
Skillset-wise, I have about 15 years of programming experience in various languages, though in recent times, I’ve gravitated towards dynamic-ish languages — ruby and python are favorites, depending on what needs to be done. I actually like javascript. I’m quite light on graphic and interaction design skills; I really don’t feel like I’ve ever made anything really beautiful, or with a particularly elegant interface.
And here is a picture of me, from when I became married.
Leslie Watkins
first-year grad student, Computer Sciences
Interests? My interests lie mainly in interdisciplinarity and cognitive science. I have particularly enjoyed learning about graphics and visualization (which is why I’m here).
Since I’m interested in visualization as a science and I don’t have a specific “domain” to apply it to, I guess I would fall somewhere near the Vis Scientist category.
Expectations? My expectation for this class is to learn about the scientific rigor applied to a field that I have previously thought of as being guided primarily by subjective principles.
Skills? I came here last semester knowing Matlab, and have since learned C++ in what could best be described as a baptism by fire.
I’m a first year grad student in the CS department working towards a masters degree.
Before coming to Madison I received my Bachelors degree in computer engineering from MSOE and worked for about three years after that. Highlights of my career include working on embedded systems with PIC microprocessors, doing data analysis and later quantitative trading for a hedge fund, and controlling printer finishing equipment at Quad/Tech.
After all of that, I decided that I wanted to work in the computer animation industry and so I applied to Madison to focus on computer graphic for a few years before diving in. I’m interested in pretty much anything that has to do with computer animations including modeling, rendering, and animating.
I’m interested in the vis class because there is an awful lot of information to visualize when dealing with all aspects of computer animation. A big part of the animation industry is now bringing down costs and making production processes quicker. Better methods of visualization could be key to this task.
I’m also interested in vis from an educational stand point. I good visualization can mean the difference between leaning a complicated subject or being completely overwhelmed by it. I’m interested in any methods of making difficult subjects such as transient analysis of linear circuits easier to understand through good visuals.
From that description, I would say that I fall between vis science and domain science. As far as my expectations for the course go, I would like to see some of the interested ideas I’ve had for visualizing circuits and math problems come to light as small projects. I’d also like to get an idea of what “works” in terms of visualizing different types of data.
My skill sets pretty much include C++/C and Java for programming languages and a decent ability to to work spacially. I’ve done some work with web development inclucing php and database work although I don’t consider myself a pro. Durring my down time I like to play the guitar and drums, draw picturs, watch movies (computer animated) and play video games.
Here’s a picture of me
Unfortunately, I don’t have a personal website that’s worth looking.
