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.
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.
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.
“Quantifying User-centered Experiences (QUE-2016)” was the title of the the 1st Summer School for Visual Computing at the University of Stuttgart (Germany), organized by the SFB-TRR 161. From 2nd to 6th 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.
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).
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”.
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.
Last month we had the pleasure to attend the CHI’16 conference in San José, USA. ACM CHI is the international top conference for Human-Computer Interaction. It brings together top researchers from academia and industry from around the world.
Knowing where people look at when they investigate visual stimuli such as pictures and video content provides valuable information for multiple application scenarios. The investigation of viewing behavior has become a popular approach that provides a glimpse into the human mind. May it be a person sitting in front of a computer screen or walking in the park, different eye-tracking devices can record where and how long a person spent visual attention for nearly all possible visual stimuli. Depending on the device, up to 2000 gaze positions per second and the visual stimulus can be recorded for an individual person. Typically, many more persons are recorded in a user study, and the goal is to compare this massive amount of data in order to find similarities as well as outliers in the viewing behavior.
Vehicle handling is a task that places high demands on our visual system. When driving a car, we have to constantly attend to visual factors such as our distance to the car in front of us, our lane-position, road-signs, and more. Therefore, perceptual distraction during driving can be expected to impair our ability to handle a vehicle. Nonetheless, some levels of distractibility can sometimes be beneficial – it can grant us access to unanticipated events that might be relevant. In our new article, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, we investigate how neural activity changes in order to maintain the balance between driving performance and the perception and processing of events outside of the focus of our visual attention.