assignment due Thursday, January 28th (please post your comments before 9am so we can read them before class)
The goal of this assignment is to give you an idea of what is going on in “Visualization Research” as a Computer Science Discipline. This is only one perspective on visualization, and this will give you a particular slice of it, but its better than nothing.
The premiere academic venue for Visualization (as a computer science sub-area) is IEEE “VisWeek.” Its a set of 3 conferences that are co-located. The proceedings are published as a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. The event is evolving. Its usually in October.
The past few years, there’s been 3 events “Vis,” “InfoVis,” and “Vast” (Visual Analytics Science and Technology). The most recent one (2009) was in Atlantic City this past October.
The goal of this assignment is to give you an idea of what kinds of things go on at this venue (as a way of sampling what “Visualization Research” is.
Your task is to look through the “proceedings” of the “conference” (really the 3 co-located events) and see what catches your eye. Of course, this being the modern era, you won’t actually look at the printed proceedings (they don’t even give it out at the conference – they give out a USB stick). One down side is that printed proceedings are great to flip through for this kind of purpose, and online proceedings are less skimmable. You don’t need to read the papers, but I want you to get a sense of what kinds of topics are there (and might be interesting to you). If you had the printed proceedings, you could flip through and see what pictures stood out.
What you should do (the resources for doing this are below):
- Look over all the titles, see what catches your eye.
- For some subset of those, look a little more closely. Read the abstract, look at the pictures, maybe the author has a website or something…
- Pick a few of your favorites. Between 3-5. At least one must come from InfoVis, at least one must come from Vis. Give your list as a comment to this message. Please either remember your list or bring it to class.
Without the printed proceedings, your resources for doing it:
- The VGTC website. VGTC is the committee of IEEE that organizes the conferences. They have a great website. For example, at this page you can see a list of all the papers, links to the abstracts, and links to the slides from most of the talks from Vis09. (there’s a similar page for infovis).
- The graphics papers on the web resource has links for Vis09 and InfoVis09. These are unofficial, but they usually have links to either the author’s web pages or the project web pages, where you can find more info (and even the PDF of the paper).
- The official digital library page. Most useful to get the actual papers. We have a campus-wide subscription (so either access it with a campus IP address, or use the library’s proxy server).
- If you’re off campus, you need to access the IEEE DL via a proxy. I think this works.
All you need to do is add a list of 3-5 papers as a comment to this posting, and come prepared to talk about what you’ve found. Again, I don’t expect you to actually read any complete papers (you are welcome to, but there will be plenty of time for that later in the semester) – but I do want you to get a sense of the range of topics that people are writing about.
Addendum: the digital library, while inconvenient, is the only real way to get the papers reliably and officially. Many authors put copies of the papers on their personal or group websites, but not everyone (and its unclear with the IEEE copyright agreement if this is a legal thing to do. it is OK with ACM).
Addendum 2: I understand that the papers people pick will be biased towards those that are convenient to find. There is no notion that this will be an unbiased sampling.
And here is a picture of me, from when I became married.