Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Techniques To Visualize Occluded Graph Elements For 2.5d Map Editing, Kazuyuki Fujita, Daigo Hayashi, Kotaro Hara, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose an interface with two novel techniques to visualize occluded graph nodes and edges that help the user edit map data with a 2.5D geographical structure (e.g., multi-floor indoor maps). We first design a visualization technique —Repel Signification— that employs micro-animation to signify the graph elements that are overlapping with each other (and potentially erroneous). We also design a technique that enables the user to edit the occluded components with Expansion Interaction, which simultaneously visualizes both in-floor and across-floor occluded connections between the map elements. The combination of the two methods would enable the map editors (non-experts) to effectively …

Building Something With The Raspberry Pi, Richard Kordel

Harrisburg University Presidential Research Grants

In 2017 Ryan Korn and I submitted a grant proposal in the annual Harrisburg University President’s Grant process. Our proposal was to partner with a local high school to install a classroom of 20 Raspberry Pi’s, along with the requisite peripherals. In that classroom students would be challenged to design something that combined programming with physical computing. In our presentation to the school we suggested that this project would give students the opportunity to be “amazing.”

As part of the grant, the top three students would be given scholarships to HU and the top five finalists would all be permitted …

Needfinding, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This activity guides students through the process needfinding to identify areas of need for their creation of a technology for the "public good." Students will conduct contextual inquiry to identify the needs of their target audience.

Personas, Scenarios And Storyboards, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This activity guides students towards the creation of personas, scenarios and storyboards for a product/website that they are creating.

Public Interest Technology: Coding For The Public Good, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

These slides are used to guide a discussion with students introducing them to the notion of public interest technology and coding for the public good. The lesson is intended to spark a discussion with students about different sorts of technology and their societal ramifications.

Accessibility: The Whys And The Hows, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This presentation introduces Computer Science students to the notion of accessibility: developing software for people with disabilities. This lesson provides a discussion of why accessibility is important (including the legal, societal and ethical benefits) as well as an overview of different types of impairments (visual, auditory, motor, neurological/cognitive) and how developers can make their software accessible to users with those disabilities. This lesson includes videos and links to readings and tutorials for students.

Coding For The Public Good: Front-End Website Design And Development, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This activity helps student design and develop a front-end of a website, from wireframes through HTML/CSS/Javascript. It includes design questions for students, including the invocation of Ben Schneiderman's eight golden rules for interface design.

Note: this activity assumes prior knowledge of web development. Since this activity is designed for an HCI course, with a focus on interface design, students are not expected to create a back-end for it. This activity can obviously be modified for a full-stack experience.

Accessibility Evaluation, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This activity guides students through the evaluation of a website that they have created to see if it is accessible for users with disabilities. Students will simulate a number of different disabilities (e.g. visual impairments, color blindness, auditory impairments, motor impairments) to see if their website is accessible; they will also use automated W3 and WAVE tools to evaluate their sites. Students will consider the needs of users with disabilities by creating a persona and scenario of a user with disabilities interacting with their site. Finally, students will write up recommendations to change their site and implement the changes.

V-Slam And Sensor Fusion For Ground Robots, Ejup Hoxha

Dissertations and Theses

In underground, underwater and indoor environments, a robot has to rely solely on its on-board sensors to sense and understand its surroundings. This is the main reason why SLAM gained the popularity it has today. In recent years, we have seen excellent improvement on accuracy of localization using cameras and combinations of different sensors, especially camera-IMU (VIO) fusion. Incorporating more sensors leads to improvement of accuracy,but also robustness of SLAM. However, while testing SLAM in our ground robots, we have seen a decrease in performance quality when using the same algorithms on flying vehicles.We have an additional sensor for ground …

Android Game, Ryan Weston

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project was to create an endless runner game for Android coded in Java and XML and developed in Android Studio. In the game, the player controls a frog that jumps from lily pad to lily pad to avoid logs moving toward the player. The player must also maneuver the lily pads as they can randomly disappear. There are three difficulties in the game that vary the disappearance rate of lily pads as well as the frequency and acceleration rate of the log obstacles. The game also has a scoring system and saves the high score locally …

Virtual Reality Environment Recreation, Ryan Douglas

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will consist of a virtual reality based program that is capable of showing the user both the modern day state of a site of historic or archaeological significance, along with a recreation of what said site or area may have looked like in the past, primarily during the time that gave the site its historical significance. The virtual reality program itself is to be run on modern day Windows hardware and used with the VIVE virtual reality head-mounted display and controllers. Alongside the completed program, the creation of the environments themselves will be documented, resulting in an organized …

Deepdrawing: A Deep Learning Approach To Graph Drawing, Yong Wang, Zhihua Jin, Qianwen Wang, Weiwei Cui, Tengfei Ma, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Node-link diagrams are widely used to facilitate network explorations. However, when using a graph drawing technique to visualize networks, users often need to tune different algorithm-specific parameters iteratively by comparing the corresponding drawing results in order to achieve a desired visual effect. This trial and error process is often tedious and time-consuming, especially for non-expert users. Inspired by the powerful data modelling and prediction capabilities of deep learning techniques, we explore the possibility of applying deep learning techniques to graph drawing. Specifically, we propose using a graph-LSTM-based approach to directly map network structures to graph drawings. Given a set of …

Planningvis: A Visual Analytics Approach To Production Planning In Smart Factories, Dong Sun, Renfei Huang, Yuanzhe Chen, Yong Wang, Jia Zeng, Mingxuan Yuan, Ting-Chuen Pong, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Production planning in the manufacturing industry is crucial for fully utilizing factory resources (e.g., machines, raw materials and workers) and reducing costs. With the advent of industry 4.0, plenty of data recording the status of factory resources have been collected and further involved in production planning, which brings an unprecedented opportunity to understand, evaluate and adjust complex production plans through a data-driven approach. However, developing a systematic analytics approach for production planning is challenging due to the large volume of production data, the complex dependency between products, and unexpected changes in the market and the plant. Previous studies only provide …

Towards Automated Infographic Design: Deep Learning-Based Auto-Extraction Of Extensible Timeline, Zhutian Chen, Yun Wang, Qianwen Wang, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Designers need to consider not only perceptual effectiveness but also visual styles when creating an infographic. This process can be difficult and time consuming for professional designers, not to mention non-expert users, leading to the demand for automated infographics design. As a first step, we focus on timeline infographics, which have been widely used for centuries. We contribute an end-to-end approach that automatically extracts an extensible timeline template from a bitmap image. Our approach adopts a deconstruction and reconstruction paradigm. At the deconstruction stage, we propose a multi-task deep neural network that simultaneously parses two kinds of information from a …

Nonuniform Timeslicing Of Dynamic Graphs Based On Visual Complexity, Yong Wang, Daniel Archambault, Hammad Haleem, Torsten Moeller, Yanhong Wu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uniform timeslicing of dynamic graphs has been used due to its convenience and uniformity across the time dimension. However, uniform timeslicing does not take the data set into account, which can generate cluttered timeslices with edge bursts and empty timeslices with few interactions. The graph mining filed has explored nonuniform timeslicing methods specifically designed to preserve graph features for mining tasks. In this paper, we propose a nonuni-form timeslicing approach for dynamic graph visualization. Our goal is to create timeslices of equal visual complexity. To this end, we adapt histogram equalization to create timeslices with a similar number of events, …

A Multimodal Approach To Sarcasm Detection On Social Media, Dipto Das

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In recent times, a major share of human communication takes place online. The main reason being the ease of communication on social networking sites (SNSs). Due to the variety and large number of users, SNSs have drawn the attention of the computer science (CS) community, particularly the affective computing (also known as emotional AI), information retrieval, natural language processing, and data mining groups. Researchers are trying to make computers understand the nuances of human communication including sentiment and sarcasm. Emotion or sentiment detection requires more insights about the communication than it does for factual information retrieval. Sarcasm detection is particularly …

Evaluating The Readability Of Force Directed Graph Layouts: A Deep Learning Approach, Hammad Haleem, Yong Wang, Abishek Puri, Sahil Wadhwa, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing graph layout algorithms are usually not able to optimize all the aesthetic properties desired in a graph layout. To evaluate how well the desired visual features are reflected in a graph layout, many readability metrics have been proposed in the past decades. However, the calculation of these readability metrics often requires access to the node and edge coordinates and is usually computationally inefficient, especially for dense graphs. Importantly, when the node and edge coordinates are not accessible, it becomes impossible to evaluate the graph layouts quantitatively. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning-based approach to evaluate the …

Radish: A Cross Platform Meal Prepping App For Beginner Weightlifters, Spoorthy S. Vemula, Tanay Gottigundala, Cory Baxes

Computer Science and Software Engineering

With the increasing ease of access and decreasing price of most food, obesity rates in the developing world have risen dramatically in recent years. As of March 23rd, 2019, obesity rates had reached 39.6%, a 6% increase in just 8 years. Research has shown that people with obesity have a significantly increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers, among other life-threatening diseases. In addition, 42% of people who begin weightlifting quit because it’s too difficult to follow a diet or workout regimen.

We created Radish in an attempt to tackle these problems. Radish makes it …

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

Grant Anon Minigames Extension, Justin Robbins

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The Grant Anon system was designed to be a casualized version of the real-time strategy genre, a genre usually known for its difficulty and competitiveness because of Starcraft II, the most popular game in the genre. Grant Anon was designed as part of a capstone project, and this report details the extension that was created to add an additional element designed to make it easier for any player to enjoy Grant Anon: minigames. These minigames serve to reduce the skill needed to participate effectively in Grant Anon. This is accomplished by providing an alternative means of gaining an advantage over …

Building Consumer Trust In The Cloud: An Experimental Analysis Of The Cloud Trust Label Approach, Lisa Van Der Werff, Grace Fox, Ieva Masevic, Vincent C. Emeakaroha, John P. Morrison, Theo Lynn

Department of Computer Science Publications

The lack of transparency surrounding cloud service provision makes it difficult for consumers to make knowledge based purchasing decisions. As a result, consumer trust has become a major impediment to cloud computing adoption. Cloud Trust Labels represent a means of communicating relevant service and security information to potential customers on the cloud service provided, thereby facilitating informed decision making. This research investigates the potential of a Cloud Trust Label system to overcome the trust barrier. Specifically, it examines the impact of a Cloud Trust Label on consumer perceptions of a service and cloud service provider trustworthiness and trust in the …

Making Wearable Sensing Less Obtrusive, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sensing is a crucial part of any cyber-physical system. Wearable device has its huge potential for sensing applications because it is worn on the user body. However, wearable sensing can cause obtrusiveness to the user. Obtrusiveness can be seen as a perception of a lack of usefulness [1] such as a lag in user interaction channel. In addition, being worn by a user, it is not connected to a power supply, and thus needs to be removed to be charged regularly. This can cause a nuisance to elderly or disabled people. However, there are also opportunities for wearable devices to …

Snap Scholar: The User Experience Of Engaging With Academic Research Through A Tappable Stories Medium, Ieva Burk

CMC Senior Theses

With the shift to learn and consume information through our mobile devices, most academic research is still only presented in long-form text. The Stanford Scholar Initiative has explored the segment of content creation and consumption of academic research through video. However, there has been another popular shift in presenting information from various social media platforms and media outlets in the past few years. Snapchat and Instagram have introduced the concept of tappable “Stories” that have gained popularity in the realm of content consumption.

To accelerate the growth of the creation of these research talks, I propose an alternative to video: …

Polyxpress+: Using Social Networking To Enhance The User Experience Of An Interactive Location-Based Storytelling Application, Desiree Creel

Master's Theses

There’s no denying the ever increasing presence of social networking in our daily lives. Every day, people share what they are thinking, doing, and experiencing. But even more so, they check their favorite networks to see what the people in their lives are sharing. Social networking has become so prevalent that most applications incorporate it since it keeps users engaged and beckons them back to the application again and again.

PolyXpress is an interactive, location-based storytelling mobile application that functions as a platform for creating and experiencing stories. Written as a research project at California Polytechnic State University, it allows …

U.S. Census Explorer: A Gui And Visualization Tool For The U.S. Census Data Api, Timothy Snyder

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

U.S. Census Explorer is a software application that is designed to provide tools for intuitive exploration and analysis of United States census data for non-technical users. The application serves as an interface into the U.S. Census Bureau’s data API that enables a complete workflow from data acquisition to data visualization without the need for technical intervention from the user. The suite of tools provided include a graphical user interface for dynamically querying U.S. census data, geographic visualizations, and the ability to download your work to common spreadsheet and image formats for inclusion in external works.

Feasible Form Parameter Design Of Complex Ship Hull Form Geometry, Thomas L. Mcculloch

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis introduces a new methodology for robust form parameter design of complex hull form geometry via constraint programming, automatic differentiation, interval arithmetic, and truncated hierarchical B- splines. To date, there has been no clearly stated methodology for assuring consistency of general (equality and inequality) constraints across an entire geometric form parameter ship hull design space. In contrast, the method to be given here can be used to produce guaranteed narrowing of the design space, such that infeasible portions are eliminated. Furthermore, we can guarantee that any set of form parameters generated by our method will be self consistent. It …

Open Source Foundations For Spatial Decision Support Systems, Jochen Albrecht

Publications and Research

Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) were a hot topic in the 1990s, when researchers tried to imbue GIS with additional decision support features. Successful practical developments such as HAZUS or CommunityViz have since been built, based on commercial desktop software and without much heed for theory other than what underlies their process models. Others, like UrbanSim, have been completely overhauled twice but without much external scrutiny. Both the practical and the theoretical foundations of decision support systems have developed considerably over the past 20 years. This article presents an overview of these developments and then looks at what corresponding tools …

Eye Pressure Monitior, Andrea Nella Levy

Computer Engineering

The document describes a mobile application that takes information from an attached device which tests eye pressure. The device consists of an IOIO board connected to a custom device that measures the frequency of a given waveform. The device was designed by another student for their senior project, which I am taking over. This device is connected to an IOIO board which is a board designed by a Google employee which works with an android phone in order to create applications that work with embedded systems. The board comes with an API and connects to the phone via a micro-USB. …

Disruptive Technology: Can The Banking Industry Harness Disruption For Competitive Edge?, Edgar Low

MITB Thought Leadership Series

Disruptive innovation was identified as a phenomenon more than two decades ago by prominent Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen. So you may wonder why established industries are only now waking up to the prospect of digital transformation - the banking industry in particular.

Mixed-Reality For Object-Focused Remote Collaboration, Martin Feick, Anthony Tang, Scott Bateman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we outline the design of a mixed-reality system to support object-focused remote collaboration. Here, being able to adjust collaborators' perspectives on the object as well as understand one another's perspective is essential to support effective collaboration over distance. We propose a low-cost mixed-reality system that allows users to: (1) quickly align and understand each other's perspective; (2) explore objects independently from one another, and (3) render gestures in the remote's workspace. In this work, we focus on the expert's role and we introduce an interaction technique allowing users to quickly manipulation 3D virtual objects in space.