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Spring 2012
VISUALIZATION FRIDAY FORUM
Fridays 12-1pm LSRC D106
Lunch is served
January 27 -The Body as Controller: Negotiating Composition and Performance through Interactivity
Kenneth David Stewart
Department of Music
imnewhere is a piece about storytelling and live composition with the Microsoft Kinect for the Xbox. In the work, the body is treated as a controller for the audio and a data source for the mapping of compositional parameters that can be improvised in realtime. The work transforms gestural information from the composer and performer Kenneth David Stewart to manipulate its soundscape. Stewart’s Max/MSP patch allows for smooth and articulate manipulation of the data to construct aural output (and visualization), fed through the library OSCeleton into MaxMSP/Jitter. Details on Kenneth's design and implementation are here.
February 3 - Intertidal bio-geomorphic patterns and the history of the lagoon of Venice
Marco Marani
Earth and Ocean Sciences, NSOE
The Venice lagoon is a natural lab for which long-term observations exist, documenting changes in geomorphological and ecological structures in response to climatic and anthropogenic forcings. I will briefly review the environmental changes documented over several centuries in the Venice lagoon through maps and documents, discussing the controlling processes and showing how remote sensing and mathematical modelling can help us extract process characteristics from patterns.
February 10 - From perspective representation to (digital) reality
Andrea Giordano
Department of Architecture, Planning and Surveying, University of Padua, Italy
Historical paintings and engravings are an important documentary source for studying the history of urban transformations in architecture and city design. By applying perspective transformations and architectural engineering rules, we can digitally reproduce 3D models of the buildings and spaces portrayed in the pictures and thereby find out valuable details related to the processes of transformation and change in the city.This talk will present our work applying these techniques to several historical paintings.
February 17 - Remote Sensing of the Venice lagoon and its watershed
Sonia Silvestri
Earth and Ocean Sciences, NSOE
The Venice lagoon (Italy) is one of the largest lagoons in Europe, with a high environmental and socio-economic significance, also linked to the historical and cultural value of the city of Venice. In this presentation, remote sensing is used to look at the spatial and temporal variability of some environmental processes and to provide a visualization of such variability. Remote sensing facilitates the acquisition of spatial data and the interpretation of its space-time properties, providing access to the geometric patterns that can not be obtained using point measurements, particularly in a dynamic environment such as a coastal lagoon. Applications on the Venice lagoon watershed, where aquifer pollution may have fundamental impacts on the water quality of the lagoon, will also be presented.
February 24 - Timeline Annotator for Comics
Lena Merhej
VisComX, Jacobs University, Bremen Germany
In the course of research on comics’ analysis, designing software that enables viewing and annotating comics proves to be efficient for accessing discreet and global aspects of narration in comics. This presentation proposes a timeline annotator for comics. Its basic features are the annotation of a layered timeline and the multiple views of the same data. These features adjust to the structure of comics: the frame, the page, the double page, and the network. The data is comics pages cut down to panels horizontally distributed on a timeline, constituted by customizable layers that one can annotate. Clustering of elements on the different layers is enabled to distinguish and reveal patterns and transformations. Again, several modes of viewing and annotating the data is proposed. The single panel reveals its elements, such as characters, comic bubbles and background, on individual layers. The page or the strip reveals the spatial configuration and the specific location of the panels, and the network reveals all the panels and the clustering in the timeline, allowing the analysis of the narration, the focalization and the structure of the comics' stories. See an image of Lena's interface.
March 2 - SWAMP: Duke Universities Outdoor Laboratory for Water Sustainability Studies
Curt Richardson
Resource Ecology, NSOE
A Stream Wetland Assessment Management Park was established in the Duke Forest in 2007 to mitigate impacts of urban water runoff from the city of Durham and the Duke Campus. At Duke University a 24 acre Stream and Wetland Assessment Management Park (SWAMP) was created over the past 11 years in the lower portion of the Durham watershed to assess the cumulative effect of restoring multiple portions of stream and former adjacent wetlands, with specific goals of quantifying water quality improvements, improving habitat and increasing ecosystem functions. SWAMP has become a key part of Duke Universities plan to “green” the campus, provide flood and water quality improvements, but more importantly act as a student outdoor laboratory for dozens of classes at Duke and the Triangle. The design, implementation and value of this living laboratory will be discussed. The educational value of the site comes to life with a series of colored signs posted along each phase of the Park around the Washington Duke Inn running trail.
March 9 - Spring Break
March 16 - Enhancing visual cognition and sports performance through vision training
Steve Mitroff
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Sports often involve dynamic activities that require participants to be at the right place at the right time (e.g., a baseball player must accurately judge the timing and location of a pitched ball). Such tasks are at the core of being able to perform well at sport, and in many cases they rely on vision and attention. Given that it is possible that even a small change in ability could manifest in measurable differences on the field or court, it is in athletes’ best interest to always be looking for new means to train and improve their skills. We will discuss our recent findings that a new sports vision training tool (stroboscopic eyewear) can improve sports performance specifically and vision and attention more generally.
March 23 - Mapping the Intrinsic Structure of Cognitive Neuroscience
Greg Appelbaum
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Using a recently conceived set of rhetorical and semantic network analysis tools, we have begun to map the knowledge space of the discipline of Cognitive Neuroscience. By applying network text analysis and graph theoretic visualizations to a large and representative corpus of contemporary papers that employ fMRI to investigate cognitive function we have mapped the interrelation between brain and behavioral terminology that constitute the core pillars of this discipline. This approach allows us to understand both how individual concepts are represented as well as the structural properties that shape the literature.
March 30 - Title
Todd Berreth
Visual Studies
Abstract
April 6 - Title
Ronak Etemadpour
Computer Science, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
Abstract
April 13 - Feasibility of a Virtual Environment for Diabetes Self-Management: Multidimensional Data Visualization
Constance Johnson and Allison Vorderstrasse
School of Nursing
Successful self-management of Type 2 Diabetes is essential to reducing morbidity and mortality associated with this disease, which is the 6th leading cause of death in the U.S. Through the testing of a virtual environment that promotes self-management skills, we are spatially transforming audio (voice-over IP) communication, text communication, avatar movement, avatar interaction with objects, and the formation of social networks to understand the complexity of this interactive data and reveal thematic patterns.
For more information, please contact Rachael Brady
Organized by The Visualization Technology Group (VTG),
Sponsored by Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) and Visual Studies