During my research stay at InnoVis, University of Calgary, Canada I worked with Lindsay MacDonald Vermeulen, Jo Vermeulen, Charles Perin, Wesley Willett, Thomas Ertl, and Sheelagh Carpendale on a project, which recently was accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
On Wednesday September 20th, Jakob Karolus and me ran a Physical Computing and Biosensing Hackathon within the context of the AffecTech training week in Lancaster. In this day-long event, 15 AffecTech Ph.D. students with backgrounds ranging from Clinical Psychology to Human-Computer Interaction worked in multidisciplinary groups to create systems that support people coping with emotional and affective conditions.
Mein BOGY war eine rundum sehr gelungene Woche, in der ich viel Neues erfahren und gelernt habe, aber auch Spaß daran haben konnte, mich mit anderen Studenten, Doktoranden und Professoren zu unterhalten. Es war eine Bestärkung in meinem Berufswunsch ein Studium im MINT-Bereich zu machen, auch wenn ich noch nicht sicher bin, in welche Richtung es genau gehen wird.
During December 2017, I have visited Prof. Dietmar Saupe’s group at the University of Konstanz, Germany. In my first week I had the chance to give a talk about Image quality assessment based on visual perception as part of the Lecture Series “Visual Computing” of the SFB-TRR 161. During the month I was mainly working on the image quality assessment of differently distorted images.
At the software visualization conference VISSOFT, we presented a tool for tracing memory access patterns of arbitrary applications at runtime and then doing post-mortem visual analysis. The purpose of this visualization is to help developers finding hints for optimization of their code regarding memory usage. This is important for many applications in the area of high-performance computing, especially because the gap between processor and memory speeds continues to grow. Thus, memory accesses pose a bottleneck for performance-critical applications.
The SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 conference was held in Bangkok. It attracted many interested visitors from industry, education and other fields. The conference is mainly about rendering, graphics and animation. However, there is also a small Symposium on Visualization (SA17VIS) for researches from visualization and more graphics intensive backgrounds to meet and exchange ideas. During this symposium we had the change to present our paper “Visual Exploration of Mainframe Workloads”.
Each year in December, senior Human-Computer Interaction researchers meet to discuss the articles submitted to the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (or in short CHI). CHI is the most important venue for research on Human-Computer Interaction and covers a broad range of research from understanding people, via novel interaction techniques to visualization. This year, over 300 researchers came to Montreal and discussed the articles submitted to CHI 2018. With Harald Reiterer and me, two associate chairs from Konstanz and Stuttgart participated in the meeting. CHI only accepts about 25% of the submissions after a rigorous peer review process. With 16 accepted publications, the groups participating in SFB-TRR 161 from Konstanz, Tübingen, and Stuttgart have been very successful and are happy about how well their submissions have been received.
The International Society on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia (VSMM) held its 23rd International Conference in Dublin/Ireland and Belfast/Northern Ireland, on October 30th to November 5th, 2017. In total, about 150 participants enjoyed an exciting program, consisting of Workshops and Conference tracks in Dublin, and Special Workshops and Cultural Tours in Belfast. The VSMM Society launched its conferences 23 years ago in Japan, in the early stages of Virtual Reality applications. Since then, it brings together leading researchers in the application of digital media, mobile, and virtual and augmented reality technology together with users across a diverse community.
Prof. Dr. Uta Hinrichs from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland visited the project group of Prof. Dr. Harald Reiterer at the University of Konstanz end of October 2017. During her stay, she held an interesting talk about ‘Visualization as a Process’ where she illustrated the benefits and drawbacks of different visualization tool paradigms on the visualization creation process and outlined how an emphasis on “process” may open up new ways of discussing the role of visualization across disciplines and contexts. After her talk she kindly was available for a short interview.
This year, the 16th International Conference for Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2017) was held at the University of Stuttgart. Researchers from all around the world met from November 26th to 29th to present and discuss their latest work. Its single track program featured presentations about several topics from the cutting edge of research in Human Computer Interaction, along an art exposition, a Doctoral Consortium, posters sessions, workshops and tutorials.