Spring 2010

VISUALIZATION FRIDAY FORUM

Fridays 12-1pm LSRC D106

Lunch Served


January 29 - Multimedia Mapping in Muhuru Bay, Kenya

Victoria Szabo 

ISIS & Art, Art History & Visual Studies

How does coordinated use of "consumer" mapping tools enable subject-area experts to take advantage of geo-spatial information for their research and community development projects? Over the last year, the ISIS program has been partnering with Duke Global Health and DukeEngage to answer this question through a variety of curricular and co-curricular experiences and collaborative research efforts centered around the Muhuru Bay region in Kenya, where the WISER NGO recently opened a boarding school for local girls (January 2010) and is facilitating various community development projects. Students, researchers, and community members have worked in Kenya and at Duke with GPS-enabled cameras, video, Google Earth, and a variety of other applications to create collaboratively a media-rich, layered map environment representing Muhuru Bay, which will be demonstrated. We'll also discuss lessons learned, and next steps for the project for 2010.

Joint work with Sherryl Broverman

see a video of the talk (skip the first 10 minutes)


February 5 - From the Big Bang to Atmospheric Modeling: The Need for Advanced  Model to Data Analysis Techniques

Steffan Bass

Physics

Advances in computing power have led to  breakthroughs in modeling complex systems. Likewise, experimental  data sets have similarly grown in size and complexity, surpassing the petabyte scale in many instances.  Lagging behind  this progress is the development of rigorous tools for comparing  model and simulation output to large data sets. The complexity  and scope of both the models and the data sets demands new strategies and tools, that exploit twenty-first century advances in computing,  statistics and visualization.  Recently, the NSF awarded a Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) award to a collaboration of scientists from Michigan State University, Duke and UNC in the areas  of Nuclear Physics, Cosmology, Astophysics, Athmospheric Sciences, Statistical Sciences and Computer Science to develop novel statistical analysis and advanced visualization techniques to tackle this  modeling and data analysis challenge.  In my presentation, I will discuss the science behind the Nuclear Physics component of the proposal and elucidate how state-of-the-art visualization is instrumental in achieving the scientific goals of the proposal.
 
Note: this is the first of two lectures on this project.  The second lecture focuses on the visualization aspects, given by Xunlei Wu on April 9th, 2010.
see a video of the talk (skip the first 5-9 minutes of video)


February 12 -  Cryptology and the origins of computation

Nick Gessler

Information Science + Information Studies

This talk will be about re-visualizing and re-experiencing the past
through surviving artifacts, reproductions, simulations and reconstructed environments of Cryptology.  Specifically, the individual works of Jim Oram, Jim Sanborn and Dirk Rijmenants as well as the corporate works of Bletchley Park, the National Cryptologic Museum and the Spy Museum will be featured.  I will speak about the importance of rotor machines and the origins of computation.  A variety of crypto devices including several rotor machines will be on display.
see a video of the talk (skip the first 10 minutes of video)

February 19 -  Developing Proficiency in Resident Intubation Skills

David Tanaka

Pediatrics, Div. of Neonatology


Although acquisition of intubation skills is an essential element of medical training, current Socratic methods to teach this skill are inadequate in today’s time-constrained training program. New cross-discipline techniques and tools will be required to increase the training process if future medical practitioners are to obtain and subsequently retain this life saving skill.  This talk will motivate the need for improved intubation training and describe the projects currently under development for delivering novel and effective training tools.

see a video of the talk (skip the first 15 minutes of video)


February 26 - Good Fences: Scientific Visualization, Data Visualization, Information Design, and Data-based Art

Casey Alt

Art, Art History & Visual Studies

This talk seeks to distinguish and define four oft-conflated but distinct visual practices: scientific visualization, data visualization, information design, and data-based art. The goal in mapping these differences is not to distance them, but rather to increase inter-domain understanding and communication regarding the specific goals and challenges implicit to each. Particular attention will be paid to exploring the professional and material challenges inherent to information design and data-based art along with multiple examples of strong work in each field. Finally, examples of successful cross-domain projects will suggest productive modes of collaboration across each of the individual disciplines.

see a video of the talk


March 5 - More Than Pretty Pictures

Felice Frankel

Harvard

The visual expression of scientific data and concepts using photographs, graphs, animations, and web interfaces are designed to convey complex information. Yet, despite the best intentions of research scientists and designers, many attempts to visually communicate science are confusing rather than clarifying. This talk will discuss one person's successful and failed attempts to making scientific representations and how the process advances scientific thinking while creating a more accessible scientific vocabulary for the public and policy makers.
see a video of the talk

March 12 - SPRING BREAK 


March 19 - Methods and Measures in Optimizing Human-Systems Design

Melanie Wright

Human Simulation and Patient Safety

Human-centered design is an approach in which systems are designed around the needs and capabilities of the users, as opposed to being driven by the available technology.  A systems approach suggests that we must consider the implication of any individual component or device within the context of the entire system and the environment in which it will be used.  In this presentation, I will discuss methods and measures in a human-centered design process with examples from applications in the context of research at the Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center at Duke University Medical Center.
see a video of the talk

March 26 - Cross-sectional dispersion of returns in emerging markets equities: models for
quantifying and visualizing relative active management opportunity

Daniel Eggar

Masters of Engineering Management Program

We developed a predictive model after studying the monthly price changes of approximately 2500 stocks over 13 years.  We found we can forecast with reasonable accuracy the standard deviation of the distribution of individual stock price changes around the mean price change. This value is known as the "cross-sectional dispersion" of the prices and is useful in determining what investment concentration (how large or small the portfolio size) is optimal for active managers of known skill.

see a video of the talk


April 2 -Earthquakes From Haiti to Chile: An Introduction to Seismology and How Geologists Make the Invisible Visible

Alex Glass

Nicholas School of the Environment

With the recent quakes in Haiti and Chile, the urgency of the need for better predictive methods for earthquakes has once again been catastrophically underlined.  Much of the problem lies in the fact that even our most basic understanding of the nature and behavior of fault zones remains limited.  What are the means by which seismologists study the nature and geometry of faults at depth?  What roles do graphic presentations ranging from recurrence interval maps, damage projection graphics, and tomographic imaging play in educating both the public and policy makers about earthquake hazards?  What challenges do geologists face in explaining the nature, cause, and method of study of earthquakes to a non-scientific audience?

 see a video of the talk


April 9 - Visualizing the Big Bang - Ensemble Style

Xunlei Wu

Physics

This is not where we are but rather where we want to be. High energy physics as one of the six distinct scientific domains
involved in an NSF CDI project which is looking for a streamlined, comprehensive, and yet scalable visual-analytic workbench to study
parameter sensitivity in simulations as well as the difference between experiments and simulations. I will present the prototype which helped us to secure the 4-yr multi-institutional grant, the challenges in data management, and the plan on how to do comparative visualization.
Note: this is the second of two lectures on this project.  The first lecture, given on Feb 5, 2010 by Stephen Bass, focused on the scientific problem.  A video of that lecture is available on this web page (scroll back to Feb 5th).
due to a fire alarm, the talk begins at minute 22 in the video - see a video of the talk

 

April 16 - What's in a face?

Arvid Kappas

School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

 Faces are fascinating for laypeople and scientists alike. They convey information about stable person properties, such as identity, age, gender, or ethnicity, as well as rapidly changing communicative cues, particularly regarding someone's emotional states. Much research has been conducted in the last century on the perception of faces and their expressions using still photography, going back to Darwin's seminal The Expression of the Emotions (1872). I will discuss how the use of synthetic images, particularly animations, may help addressing some questions that are difficult to investigate using more natural stimuli.

see a video of the talk


April 23 - Democratizing Visualization

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenburg

Flowing Media, Inc

We will describe a program of research aimed at "democratizing" visualization: that is, bringing the power of visual analytics to mass audiences. We will describe our experiences designing and deploying IBM's Many Eyes site, as well as the role of visualization in journalism and the arts.
 

 

For more information, please contact Rachael Brady

Organized by The Visualization Technology Group (VTG),

Sponsored by Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS)

and The Department of Computer Science