CS 5764: Information Visualization

Semester Project

The goal of the semester project is to design, develop, and evaluate a new information visualization.  The purpose is to gain experience in applying information visualization to a difficult problem and contributing novel research.  The project is expected to be a significant effort, with useful quality results. This will involve much creativity, 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.

The Topic:  

The general topic area that your project should address is visualization for intelligence analysis.  The intelligence analysis exercise we did in class should give you a good idea about the types of problems encountered in this domain.  You can tackle visualization problems identified in that exercise, or feel free to take on other visualization problems of your choice related to intelligence analysis or security.  You may use the data from the exercise (supplement with additional data since that data is limited), or find other data (e.g. the VAST contest intelligence data).  You may want to concentrate on certain aspects of the overall problem.  With permission of the instructor, you may pursue other topics for your project such as related to your thesis research.

Your final product should be a functioning demonstration tool.  You are welcome to use any design tools and implementation environments as you see fit.  I encourage some groups to make use of the VT GigaPixel high-resolution tiled display facility as the base for their design.  Access to the facility can be arranged.  The VT 3D CAVE is also available.  Impress me.

The Teams:  

You will work in teams of 3-4 students.  Form teams during the 1st week of class.  I also encourage multiple teams to work together in a coordinated way, so that their final products can link in some way.  For example, two teams might work on two different aspects of the problem, so that the combination of the two tools creates an even more powerful solution.

Teamwork can be difficult!  It is helpful to clearly identify how each team member contributes at each stage of the project.  At the end of the semester, I will ask each team to list each member's contributions. Typically, all members of a team receive the same project scores, except for clear occasions.  Report any team problems to the instructor early, so something can be done to remedy the situation before it is too late.

The Process:  

The steps of the process and deliverables are as follows (due dates on main page):

1. Team formation:  Form a team of 3-4 students during the 1st week of class.  Hand in a list of team member names, and a team name.  Then, get started quickly!
    
2. Design concept & presentation:  Identify the problem you will tackle, review potentially related work, and create your visualization design concept.  This is the time to think big and dream up interesting solutions.  Your final design should be thorough enough that you can begin implementation and evaluation next.  The primary output goal of this step is to convey your design to the instructor and class.  The design step has 2 deliverables:
   • Written report:  should contain at least the following:
     • Front matter:  Title, team members and contact info, 1 paragraph abstract summarizing the concept.
     • Introduction:  clearly identify the problem, research questions, and goals of the project.
     • Literature review:  identify and review the related literature and solutions (see comments below).
     • Design:  describe the proposed design of the visualization and user interface. Include figures.  Identify any open questions about the design that need to be resolved by evaluations.  Describe alternative designs considered, and/or broader picture within which your design fits.
     • Impact:  describe the benefits and limitations of the potential results of the project.
     • Schedule:  identify the action plan, who will do what and when?
   • In-class Presentation:  Each team will give a 10 minute presentation of their design concept.  Convey your concept by whatever means you see fit.  Be creative.

   Note about Literature Review:  Review the research and solutions 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.
    

3. Initial implementation:  Refine your design through feedback from step 2.  Develop and initial implementation of your refined design.  The deliverable at this step includes screenshots of the initial implementation, and a short progress report that presents the refined design, implementation status, and any changes to the project scope.
    
4. Complete implementation: This should be your fully functional demonstration.  The deliverable is screenshots and a short progress report.
    
5. Evaluation report:  Your evaluation consists of 3 parts.  Part 1 is the insight-based results of your own data analysis using your visualization.  You should report the insights you discovered from the data, and your data hypothesis (what the terrorists are planning), and how your visualization helped or hindered your analysis.  Part 2 is an insight-based usability study of your visualization with a few other users.  Recruit some users (not from the class) to use your tool to analyze the data, and report their findings and how your visualization helped or hindered their analysis. Finally, part 3 reports refinements to your design based on the results from parts 1 & 2.
    
6. Final presentation:  During the last week of class, each team will give a presentation of their final product, including demo, and your insights/hypothesis about the data.  This is your opportunity to show off what you have accomplished and impress everybody.  It may be necessary to schedule a separate demo with the instructor to adequately demonstrate the entire work.
    
7. Final paper and archive:  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 at least include:
   • Introduction:  clearly identify the problem, research questions, and goals of the project.
   • Literature review:  identify and review the related literature.
   • Design:  describe the visualization, examples/scenarios, implementation.
   • Evaluation and results
   • Future work and conclusions:  must include a statement of the intellectual contributions made by the work.
   • References cited
   • an appendix statement of what work each team member contributed during the entire project.

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

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