Visual Computing BLOG

Programmers’ Signposts

Have you ever felt lost in a foreign city? Software engineers know that feeling when they navigate through unfamiliar code. It might sound like a trivial problem, but studies have shown that they spend about 25% of their time just on code navigation. We – a group of researchers from the University of Stuttgart Visualization Research Center (VISUS) – have developed signposts for software engineers. Just like real signpost, ours intend to guide software developers through the code, providing data to make informed decisions where to turn next.

Back from SAP 2016 and SIGGRAPH 2016

Last month I had the pleasure to attend the conferences SAP 2016, an international conference on applied perception, and SIGGRAPH 2016, the top conference for Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Anaheim, USA. Both conferences were co-located to promote the communication between the core perception and computer graphics communities. At SAP I presented my work “Emotion Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Does Stylization Help?” Afterwards I hat the chance to attend SIGGRAPH.

Eye Tracking – The Next Big Thing for Automatic Driving

Nowadays a big vision of the automotive industry is autonomous driving. Since Google’s introduction of autonomously driving cars, car manufacturers, their suppliers, but also IT companies and the scientific community are excited about the upcoming revolution of transportation. The biggest advantages of autonomous driving are a higher driving comfort, and assumed the driving systems work reliably, a better driving safety. But there are many issues that have to be resolved until autonomous driving can be fully realized.

Young Academics Discuss Research and Collaboration

The doctoral retreat 2016 was held at the Waldhotel Zollernblick from 18th to 20th of July. We, the PhD students from SFB-TRR 161, would like to thank everybody who made it possible to discuss our research and collaboration in a relaxed atmosphere.

Provenance: On and Behind the Screens

Melanie Herschel and I gave a tutorial at this year’s ACM SIGMOD conference in San Francisco. ACM SIGMOD is one of the important conferences in the field of data engineering and management. Our tutorial with the title “Provenance: On and Behind the Screens” covered the two topics provenance and visualization, and discussed how provenance information can be visualized.

Improve Image Compression by Using Human Visual Attention Property

Humans are the end users of visual media. Therefore, in order to develop an effective quantitative assessment of visual computing quality, one must take into account how humans perceive visual quality. For example, in image compression, an adaptive bitrate allocation that favors the image foreground can be expected to increase the visual quality of decoded images.

1^st Summer School for Visual Computing in Stuttgart

1<sup>st</sup> Summer School for Visual Computing in Stuttgart

“Quantifying User-centered Experiences (QUE-2016)” was the title of the the 1^st Summer School for Visual Computing at the University of Stuttgart (Germany), organized by the SFB-TRR 161. From 2^nd to 6^th of July, about 40 PhD students from America, Hungary and Germany met at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS) and the Visualization Research Center (VISUS) to learn about visual computing and discuss current questions, trends and activities in data analysis, human-computer interaction, visualization or eye tracking. During these five days the young academics could talk about their current research activities, and exchange their know-how and their experience in the academic world.

A Visual Analysis of Political Debates

Political scientists, linguistis and computer scientists at the University of Konstanz developed an automatic system for the analysis and visualization of political communication. Their software – a result of the interdisciplinary BMBF-funded project VisArguea – allows to draw conclusions with respect to the deliberative quality of political discourse. One use case is the Stuttgart 21 mediation which took place in 2010 and aimed at resolving the conflicts around the railway and urban development project in Stuttgart (Germany).

Paul Kiparsky in Konstanz

On the 23rd of June, Paul Kiparsky, professor of linguistics at Stanford University and honorary doctor of the Department of Linguistics of the University of Konstanz, gave a talk at the 50th anniversary workshop of the lingustic department in Konstanz in which he talked about “The Konstanz Approach: An Appreciation and an Emulation”.

EuroVA and EuroVis 2016 in Groningen, Netherlands

In early June I had the opportunity to join this years EuroVis in Groningen in the Netherlands. This conference is in the top two academic events when it comes to visualization and visual analytics, so I was excited to being able to attend this event. Together with colleagues from the University of Konstanz I enjoyed a week of learning about the latest research in the field, meeting and socializing with experts from around the globe.

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