CHI 2006 Conference Overview Report.
by AliaThis years CHI focuses on several topic: navigations, mobile applications (mobile TV, wearable devices), games, privacy, large displays, visualization and tangible interfaces.
1. Topic: Visualization (interesting for eculture?)
Although there are many topics covered in CHI the topic of visualization information might be the most interesting one most related to Eculture demo. This years CHI presentation features several types of graph visualization.
a. Visualization of Large Hierarchical Data by Circle Packing (paper) Yet another Treemap in circular form. The paper describes algorithm that they apply to make a pleasant distributed circle within the circular Treemap. Lynda and I talked about the square Treemap view at our last meeting (link) Critique: This form of interface is not novel and has been implemented in Grokker, although the author claims to be different from Grokker because it chooses to display all the child node within the hierarchy (Grokker only display detail of child items only on mouse click event and hide details otherwise). Essentially it is an interaction decision in which Grokker has made the right one. |
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b. GUESS: A Language and Interface for Graph Exploration (paper) This paper concentrates on finding solutions on how a complex graph creation can be very easy via simple language, so non programmers can use it too. The language tool itself is an extension of Python. The author is also the maker of Profuse. A java-based open source visualization tool. Available at http://graphexploration.cond.org/ This interface is interesting because it can be a plug-in for any kind of visualization just by using a simple language. Might come in handy in the future.
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c. Visual Exploration of Multivariate Graph (paper) Also called the PivotGraph. It is an interesting new set of graph where the property of a node (instance) is visualized rather then the instance itself. As a result, what can be seen is relationships between different values of a property. Two new things that the Pivoted graph offer: a. solution to the spaghetti problem (a tangled-illegible-complicated graph of many nodes) by compressing the nodes and presenting only the values of the properties.b. a new insight to the data itself specially on comparisons. un-tackled problem: 1. will not work well if there are too many values of a property (4 or more), it will in turn look like a spaghetti itself.2. does not differentiate/represent multiple relationships of the same node. For eculture this kind of visualization is interesting specially when we want to provide answers to use case such as: - "do artists from one county typically knows artists from another country?", "how many dutch artists are affiliated with italian artists?"- "are there any trends of art materials used by certain artist from certain artstyles?" |
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d. Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational
Histories (paper) Datasets: Email of a person throughout time. Method: Analyzing most frequent unique words used in the body of the emails for visualization. What the interface shows: relationships of a person with other people throughout time. Critique: good (to be precise: fun) for global view and relationship analysis but not helpful for directed search.
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2. Topic: Faceted Browser (interesting for Michiel)
A course on faceted browser from Marti Hearst. She also presents some commercial and non-commercial web pages which already uses faceted browser interface. Examples are Ebay. http://www.express.ebay.com/ others:endeca.com, www.rawsugar.com, siderean.com, www.dieselpoint.com
The Faceted browser is now open source at SourceForge.net
(Copied material included.)
3. Topic: Recommendation systems (interesting for Lloyd/Chip project)
I spoke to some people from University of Michigan who are specially working on recommendation systems which might be interesting for Lloyd to check out. http://www.grouplens.org/publications.html
4. Who was there
Known people from the INS2 community include: Scott McCloud (author of the book Understanding Comics, talking at the closing plenary), Marc Davis (participating in Panel on social tagging systems) and m.c.schraefel (participating in Panel on interaction techniques on mobile devices and poster on usability research for cyber infrastructure).
5. Other Papers
Available online at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~amin/chi2006-dvd/index.htm
6. Reflection
The Mobile Social Software workshop went well. Perhaps next conference I can bring something that is not old research.
Coming back from the conference, I realized that researches in presentations typically acknowledge that there are many problems then the solutions that they gave. This gave me something to think about: SW can climb high in the value chain if SW offers solutions to the problems which can not be answered by current technology. SW value will not be by reinventing the www wheel.
1. There is a growing number of research effort in the area of trust, privacy specially related to activities online (e-commerce, e-community, awareness systems). How can semantic web tackle trust and privacy issues on the web? Can semantic web offer a good solution?
2. Ubiquitous computing and pervasive computing, industries are working full speed towards this direction. The ultimate goal is to connect everything with everything. Can SW provide a generic solution to handle the complexity in communication and organization in ubiquitous computing?