October 2008 Archives

My area of interest is about HCI and visualization. There are three major annual conferences on this field.

1. CHI



The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) series of academic conferences is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of human-computer interaction. It is hosted by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. CHI has been held annually since 1982. CHI 2009 will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. In 2009, the organization of the CHI program committee is divided into topical subcommittees including: Improving Usability; Specific Application Areas; Interaction Beyond the Individual; Design; Interaction using Specific Capabilities or Modalities; Behavioral Study and Theory; Technology, Systems, Tools, and Infrastructure; Interaction Techniques and Devices; Interaction in New Contexts.

2. UIST



The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) is the premier forum for innovations in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces. Sponsored by ACM's special interest groups on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) and computer graphics (SIGGRAPH), UIST brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW. The intimate size, the single track, and comfortable surroundings make this symposium an ideal opportunity to exchange research results and implementation experiences.

3. SIGGRAPH



Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics (CG) convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. SIGGRAPH is widely considered the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research. As of 2008, SIGGRAPH conferences was also held in Asia (SIGGRAPH Asia), in addition to the conferences in the United States. In 2011, for the first time ever, the main SIGGRAPH conference will be held outside the United States - Vancouver, Canada.

There are three major academic communities in the area which I am interested, namely human-computer interaction, and visualization.

1. ACM CHI



ACM SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, brings together people working on the design, evaluation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use. ACM SIGCHI provides an international, interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas about the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). It was formed in 1982 by renaming and refocusing SIGSOC, the Special Interest Group on Social and Behavioral Computing.

It hosts the major annual international HCI conference, CHI, with around 2500 attendees, and publishes two of the main international publications on HCI: interactions, and Transactions on CHI (TOCHI). It has two membership publications, the SIGCHI Bulletin and interactions.

The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and who have led the shaping of the field. Professor John M. Carroll and Professor Mary Beth Rosson are within this group. The Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious award SIGCHI gives. The criteria for achievement are the same as for the CHI Academy, only more so. In 2003, this award was given to Professor John M. Carroll.

2. ACM SIGGRAPH



ACM SIGGRAPH is the New York-based Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. It was founded in 1969 by Andy van Dam (its direct predecessor, ACM SICGRAPH was founded two years earlier in 1967). Computer Graphics is the quarterly periodical publication of ACM SIGGRAPH.

ACM SIGGRAPH convenes the annual SIGGRAPH conference, attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals. The organization also sponsors other conferences around the world, and regular events are held by its professional and student chapters in several countries. The organization's stated values are excellence, integrity, volunteerism, passion and cross-disciplinary interaction.

3. IEEE



The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE is an international non-profit, professional organization for the advancement of technology related to electricity. It has the most members of any technical professional organization in the world, with more than 365,000 members in around 150 countries.

IEEE produces 30 percent of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, publishing well over 100 peer-reviewed journals. The content in these journals as well as the content from several hundred annual conferences are available in the IEEE's online digital library.

We are facing exploding digital image repository in this age of bits, either in our own computer or from online resources. The problem is how to manage these images so that user can find, browse and explore them more efficiently and effectively. It can be an issue of HCI, as well as Information Visualization.


Comparing of two examples of image browsers: PhotoMesa vs. Time Quilt


PhotoMesa can be a negative example. It uses Treemap-like layout (because they are from the same research lab!) to put lots of small thumbnails all in the window. I doubt whether user could get useful information from thumbnails in this size. The only chance for user to remind a picture's content might be from the pop-out larger thumbnail when his mouse passes a certain image, which is inefficient.




Time Quilt is another attempt which arranges images by chronological order. The technique most interests me in this demo is that Time Quilt uses a representative image as the cover of a group/folder of images. When user clicks on that representative image, pictures in this certain folder will show up. It is like a zoom-in effect. However, how to choose the representative image, as well, how to arrange large set of thumbnails, it still an open question.

My advisor is Prof. Xiaolong (Luke) Zhang (full CV). From academic perspective, he is a typical information science people. He has studied and worked in three different iSchools. He holds a Ph.D degree in Information Science with a specialization in HCI from University of Michigan. He had been an assistant professor in School of Information Recourses & Library Science at The University of Arizona for 2 years. Now he is working here in IST.

Xiaolong's research interest is mostly on human-computer interaction specifically visualization. His research has two main domains: knowledge visualization and user interaction in Multiscale virtual environments. Thus his publications appear relatively on journals/conferences related to these fields. He has papers in international journals of Human Computer Studies and Virtual Reality. For conferences, I believe the most two he attends are ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST).

At teaching aspect, Xiaolong's teaching experience dates back to his graduate student time. He was the graduate instructor for several courses in SI, UMich, such as User Interface Design, and Search and Retrieval. During the working period when he was in U of Arizona, he taught courses like Introduction to Information Technologies, and Collaborative Information Retrieval. At IST, Penn State, he has taught three different courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. He used to teach IST 210: Organization of Data. Currently in this semester, he is teaching IST 220: Networking and Telecommunications (in which I am the TA) and IST 526: Information Visualization (which I am taking).