Interview with a Visual Computing Scientist

Interview with a Visual Computing Scientist

“What we aim for in the end is some sort of mechanism, that tells us, whether the users understood, what they were looking at.”

Jakob Karolus is a researcher at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems at the University of Stuttgart working in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. Within the project SFB-TRR 161 “Quantitative Methods for Visual Computing” he wants to find out how different visualizations influence the eyemovement patterns of people.

IEEE VIS 2016 in Baltimore

IEEE VIS 2016 in Baltimore

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.

Summer School in Ísafjörður, Iceland

Summer School in Ísafjörður, Iceland

I am working on the diachrony of case and word order in Indo-European languages. More precisely, I am conducting a corpus linguistic and visual analytic study of dative subjects in Icelandic. During my work I noticed, that I need more knowledge about Icelandic in order to fully understand and cope with the erroneous annotations in Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus and to improve the qualitative part of the data analysis. In August I attended a three weeks Icelandic summer school, including an intensive language course at the University of the Westfjords in Ísafjörður, Iceland.

Three Months in Calgary

Three Months in Calgary

This summer, I spent three months at the Ilab at the University of Calgary. My supervisor Sheelagh Carpendale is head of the InnoVis group which is part of the Ilab. I had the opportunity to visit the Ilab through the MIN Program: Mentoring International for Female Natural Scientists at the University Konstanz and which was funded by the Transregional Collaborative Research Center (SFR-TRR) 161. During my time, I worked with five great researchers evaluating a website developed and designed by them.

Conference Report from VMV 2016

Conference Report from VMV 2016

This year’s 21st Symposium on Vision, Modelling and Visualization (VMV) was hosted by the University of Bayreuth. International scientists presented their newest research in various sessions related to Visual Computing. Dr. Fabian Beck, member of the Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart (VISUS) and associated to SFB-TRR 161, presented his interesting work on a matrix-based visual comparison of time series sports data. As part of the VMV 2016, the SFB-TRR 161 co-organized a workshop session titled “Quantification – useful and needed?”. Three leading german researchers of the visual computing community were invited to present their take on the role of quanitification in their respective fields of expertise.

Online Study in Graph Visualization – Participants wanted!

Online Study in Graph Visualization – Participants wanted!

We are currently running an online study in the field of graph visualization. We hypothesize an optimum in the ratio of node size and edge width in node-link-diagrams. This study is wrapped in two online games, which are based on such node-link-diagrams. Here, we still need more played games. You do not need to have special knowledge about Graph Theory or similar, you only need to operate your mouse.