From June 12nd-17th, the 8th International UBI Summer School (UBISS) 2017 took place at the University of Oulu, Finland. The summer school comprised four parallel 6-day workshops. Prof. Norbert Haala and me from the University of Stuttgart visited Oulu as instructors of one of the four workshops – Virtual City Models.
In May we had the pleasure to attend this year’s CHI conference in Denver, Colorado, USA. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) is the top conference for research on Human-Computer Interaction. It brings together thousands of international top researchers from academia as well as from industry. Several members of the University of Konstanz and the SFB-TRR 161 contributed in various ways to the conference.
This year’s EuroVis, one of the most important visualization conferences in Europe, as well as many co-located events took place in Barcelona, Spain. Despite outside temperatures of well beyond 30°C, the attendees enjoyed many interesting talks on the latest visualization research topics and discussed them with researchers in the field from all over the world.
In the second half of April, I had the pleasure to attend the 10th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, usually called “PacificVis”, that was hosted this year by the Seoul National University in South Korea. I gave a talk at PacificVis about our Notes paper “Implicit Sphere Shadow Maps”. It presents a way to render high-quality soft shadows for particle data sets in real time.
Members of the SFB TRR 161 have recently participated in an “Workshop on Crowdsourcing” at the University of Konstanz. The organizers, Franz Hahn and Vlad Hosu, introduced the use of CrowdFlower for quantitative user-studies. The intention was to get participants familiar with the platform and the basic concepts of crowdsourcing for user studies. All participants were able to design and run their own hands-on experiment, to get a better feel of the challenges and benefits of crowdsourcing.
In cooperation with the “GI-Fachgruppe Be-Greifbare Interaktion”, the HCI group at the University of Stuttgart organized the annual Inventors-workshop with the topic: Using Physiological Sensing for Embodied Interaction. In the workshop, we introduced the basic concepts for sensing of human muscle activity accompanied by a refreshing Keynote from Leonardo Gizzi. We provided a basic explanation of how physiological sensing works, introduced how it can be technically realized, and showed different applications and usage scenarios.
For SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 more than six thousand people from all over the world came to Macao. For four days, the attendees of the largest annual conference in computer graphics and interactive techniques in Asia, exchanged their latest and current results in research, projects and developments in various related areas.
Last month there was a very impressive talk by Marc Stamminger, Professor for Computer Graphics at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, during the Lecture Series “Visual Computing” at the Universities of Konstanz and Stuttgart. Title of this presentation was “Is it real? Capturing and Modifying Reality”.
Our last post was about presentations at IEEE VIS 2016 in Baltimore. Apart from the already mentioned publications, there were more presentations by SFB-TRR 161 scientists at the conference.
This year, the IEEE VIS conference took part in Baltimore, Maryland which is also dubbed ‘Charm City’ by the locals. The conference was held in the Baltimore Convention Center, at the Hilton Hotel. The location is situated not far from the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, a very nice and scenic place. The conference consists of three tracks (InfoVis, SciVis & VAST). Additionally, there are many workshops and tutorials.