CS 5764: Information Visualization

Semester Project

The goal of the semester project is to contribute original research to the field of information visualization. The project is expected to be a significant effort, with useful quality results. This will involve teamwork, learning about related research, planning and implementing a solution, and writing and presenting results. All project work is in small groups. The project can easily initiate or link to your thesis research.  Good projects can result in publication.

In general, there are three categories of projects to choose from:

• Development projects will create a new visualization technique or augment an existing system to provide a solution to an open problem in visualization or to satisfy an unmet need for visualization in another domain.  Development projects will have 4 steps:
  1. Problem:  identify the problem for which a new visualization is needed, and review the related research literature.
  2. Design:  design the new visual and interactive concepts that solve the problem.
  3. Implementation:  implement the design in software.
  4. Evaluation:  perform a small usability evaluation of your implementation to examine its effectiveness.
• Evaluation projects will conduct a controlled empirical user study to test a hypothesis about visualization, compare visualization techniques, or evaluate the usability of a visualization.  Evaluation projects consist of:
  1. Hypothesis:  identify the research question and hypotheses, and review the related research literature.
  2. Experiment design and pilot study:  design an experiment to test the hypothesis, and perform a pilot study to debug the design.
  3. Evaluation:  conduct the full study and collect data.
  4. Analysis:  analyze the results and make conclusions about the hypotheses.
• Theory projects will survey the research literature on a particular aspect of visualization, and synthesize a new theory, taxonomy, or research agenda.  Theory projects involve:
  1. Need:  identify the need or gap in the visualization literature that needs more rigorous attention.
  2. Survey:  conduct a detailed and thorough review of related literature.
  3. Synthesize:  establish a basic theory or framework to clarify the issues, and synthesize the literature into it.
  4. Convey:  write a journal quality paper containing the theory and survey.

The project has 5 milestones throughout the semester:

1. Abstracts
2. Proposal
3. Midterm presentation
4. Final presentation
5. Final paper

Project Grading

Abstracts:

Form a team of 3 students and choose a project topic.  Choose from the list of project ideas, or invent your own.  Each group must discuss their topic idea with Dr. North (and the project advisors, if any) before submitting the abstract.

Each team should create a web page for their project, and must submit a 1 page project abstract that includes:

• Project title
• Names and email addresses of team members
• Project web page URL
• Description of the project topic

Proposal:

Each team must write and submit a formal project proposal that contains:

• Front matter:
  • Title
  • team members and contact info
  • 1 paragraph abstract summarizing the proposal
  • statement of which category the project fits into (development, evaluation, or theory).
• Introduction:  clearly identify the problem, research questions, and goals of the project.
• Literature review:  identify and review the related literature (see comments below).
• Design:  describe the proposed design, depending on the project category:
  • development projects:  design the visualization and user interface. Include sketches or figures.
  • evaluation projects:  design the experiment including independent/dependent variables, experimental procedure, and materials.
  • theory projects:  initial theoretical framework.
• Impact:  describe the benefits and limitations of the potential results of the project.
• Schedule:  identify the action plan (who will do what and when?), list frequent milestones and deliverables.

Literature review:  Review the research that others have done that is related to your project. The goal is to identify how your work fits into the space of the current state-of-the-art.  This will require searching and 're-searching' the scientific literature.  Useful starting points are the VT Library computer science section (which has links to the ACM and IEEE digital libraries), any relevant references in papers, and other people who are experts in the domain.  www.citeseer.com is helpful for tracking references. Be thorough!  You will be surprised how much similar work has been done previously.  Include pictures. As a rough guideline, you should have 5-10 references to closely related work.

Proposal should be apx 5 pages, single spaced 11pt font.

Midterm Presentation:

Each team will give a 10 minute presentation of their initial progress and results at the midpoint of the project period.  Presentation should include:

• development projects:  description of design and demo of initial implementation.
• evaluation projects:  description of experimental design and pilot study results.
• theory projects:  description of initial survey and theory.

Final Presentation:

During the last week of class, each team will give a 10 minute presentation of their final results. 

It may be necessary to schedule a separate demo with Dr. North to adequately demonstrate the entire work.

Final Paper and Deliverables:

Each team must produce a final paper that documents the project and results. The paper should be modeled after typical conference papers. Use the papers discussed in class as an example. Use plenty of pictures. The instructor may invite the team to submit the paper to a conference. In general, the paper should include:

• Introduction:  clearly identify the problem, research questions, and goals of the project.
• Literature review:  identify and review the related literature.
• Results:  describe the results, depending on the project category:
  • development projects:  visualization, examples, evaluation, implementation, discussion.
  • evaluation projects:  independent & dependent variables, experimental procedure, materials, results, analysis, charts.
  • theory projects:  in-depth review or taxonomy, theory or guidelines, lessons learned.
• Future work and conclusions:  must include a statement of the intellectual contributions of the work.
• References cited

Final paper should be 8 pages, using this standard conference paper format.

Submit hardcopy of the final paper, and a zip file containing all of the project materials and deliverables (code, data, presentations, papers, etc.). Update the project web page to include these materials for future generations to enjoy.

Project Grading:

• Proposal:  20%
• Presentations: 10%
• Content and paper:  70%
  • development projects:  software demo 40%, final paper 30%.
  • evaluation projects:  experiment performed 35%, final paper 35%.
  • theory projects:  depth of review 35%, synthesis of theory 35% (both in final paper).