Visual Computing BLOG

A Short Research Trip to VISUS

This summer was a bit different to me than for the rest of my colleagues at Visual Analytics and Imaging (VAI) Lab Stony Brook University and SUNY Korea, as I spent it in Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart (VISUS) for a short research trip. I got this opportunity through the PhD fellowship program, offered by the Transregional Collaborative Research Center (SFR-TRR) 161. I carried out my research in Stuttgart, with many Ph.D.’s and Post-Doc’s at single place and which was definitely a learning experience for me. The whole experience was very different for me but indeed fruitful.

How do people perceive buildings in virtual 3D cities?

Nowadays, we increasingly deal with navigation systems to find our way to unknown places, or have a look at digital maps or street views to get a first impression of places we have never been before. As the computational hardware and software conditions are constantly improving, the applications and their underlying building models do with increasing geometric complexity and detailed textures. But by creating new systems that use virtual city models, we always have to keep one question in mind: What kind of representations do we really need to understand the inherent information? Within our research we want to get a deeper understanding of the human’s cognitive experience of virtual 3D cities.

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).