On Regulatory and Organizational Constraints in Visualization Design and Evaluation

Problem-based visualization research provides explicit guidance toward identifying and designing for the needs of users, but absent is more concrete guidance toward factors external to a user's needs that also have implications for visualization design and evaluation. This lack of more explicit guidance can leave visualization researchers and practitioners vulnerable to unforeseen constraints beyond the user's needs that can affect the validity of evaluations, or even lead to the premature termination of a project. Here we explore two types of external constraints in depth, regulatory and organizational constraints, and describe how these constraints impact visualization design and evaluation. By borrowing from techniques in software development, project management, and visualization research we recommend strategies for identifying, mitigating, and evaluating these external constraints through a design study methodology. Finally, we present an application of those recommendations in a healthcare case study. We argue that by explicitly incorporating external constraints into visualization design and evaluation, researchers and practitioners can improve the utility and validity of their visualization solution and improve the likelihood of successful collaborations with industries where external constraints are more present.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, presented at BELIV workshop associated with IEEE VIS 201

A Usability Study for Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) Flight Planning Applications on Tablet Devices for Ab-initio Pilots

The proliferation of mobile technology has prompted the use of tablet devices in the cockpit and during ground operations in general aviation. Due to the increase in affordable and reliable hardware (i.e. iPads etc.), the development of pilot-specific software has led to the creation of a commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS), electronic flight bag (EFB) market. EFBs have many advantages, such as reducing the space requirements for flight documents, enabling faster searching and indexing of files, providing useful tools for flight planning, and providing automatic updates. The increase in availability of mobile technology and flight applications has allowed general aviation enthusiast and ab-initio pilots to utilize EFBs. This paper examines the usability of three of the most popular commercial EFB software programs: Foreflight mobile, Garmin Pilot, FltPlan Go. The usability study was developed for the ab-initio demographic (time), which primarily constitutes pilots who have completed their cross country training. The study assessed 30 ab-initio collegiate flight students on a series of tasks during each flight application. The usability of the applications was based on task success, time to complete the task, efficiency of the application, and learnability. The students also completed a pre survey, the NASA Task Load Index (TLX), System Usability Survey (SUS), and post survey, respectively. An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted to compare the scores of the three applications. The results of the study show that Foreflight had the best scores across all metrics

Cultural imPRINT: a History of Northwest Coast Native and First Nations Prints

Cultural imPRINT provides the first substantive art historical investigation into Northwest Coast Indigenous prints. Since the 1960s, Northwest Coast artists have employed the print medium to share their histories, heritage, and culture amongst each other and with the larger world. Because print artists number in the hundreds, and print editions in the thousands, this dissertation takes a socio-cultural approach to understanding the purposes for the medium’s production and circulation. First, it analyzes the deep histories of reproduction in the North American art world and in Northwest Coast Indigenous communities, asserting that reproduction within coastal communities serves to perpetuate history from one generation to the next. Both objects and images are imbued with the authority to carry histories so they may be retold. From this foundational understanding, prints are presented as the cultural ambassadors of the Northwest Coast Native art market. The chapter on the market centers prints to critically reevaluate the larger creation and continuance of a distinctive art world. The final chapter details the biographies of key print artists Robert Davidson, Roy Henry Vickers, Marvin Oliver, and Susan Point. These artists strategically employ the medium to create a social space for themselves and their communities’ arts practices. Their prints educate the public about Northwest Coast Indigenous cultures and insist upon the visibility of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. In observing changes to creation, reproduction, and circulation, the conclusion documents the beginning of a new era for printmaking. Cultural imPRINT surveys the first revolution in the cycle of a vital Northwest Coast arts tradition

Heritage Reproduction in the Age of High-Resolution Scanning:A Critical Evaluation of Digital Infilling Methods for Historic Preservation

High-definition digital scanning has established itself as a useful tool for documenting cultural heritage in the twenty-first century. Proponents of surveying technology are hailing the use of digital fact-based 3D models as valuable tools for recording, analyzing and safeguarding items of cultural importance. Methods for digitally filling holes have not yet been considered through the lens of historic preservation. No modeling technique is error-free and understanding how heritage professionals are addressing lacunae is vital for understanding digital heritage objects resulting from 3D scanning hardware. Frameworks exist for working with scanned data, but they define general principles for a broad range of applications and do not provide any guidelines or strategies of how to comply with them practically. This thesis is a comparative evaluation of current practices of in-filling digital lacunae that attempts to establish which methods are best suited to the following historic preservation practices: documentation, Interpretation graphics, Long-term monitoring, digital restoration, physical fabrication

ORCA-SPOT: An Automatic Killer Whale Sound Detection Toolkit Using Deep Learning

Large bioacoustic archives of wild animals are an important source to identify reappearing communication patterns, which can then be related to recurring behavioral patterns to advance the current understanding of intra-specific communication of non-human animals. A main challenge remains that most large-scale bioacoustic archives contain only a small percentage of animal vocalizations and a large amount of environmental noise, which makes it extremely difficult to manually retrieve sufficient vocalizations for further analysis – particularly important for species with advanced social systems and complex vocalizations. In this study deep neural networks were trained on 11,509 killer whale (Orcinus orca) signals and 34,848 noise segments. The resulting toolkit ORCA-SPOT was tested on a large-scale bioacoustic repository – the Orchive – comprising roughly 19,000 hours of killer whale underwater recordings. An automated segmentation of the entire Orchive recordings (about 2.2 years) took approximately 8 days. It achieved a time-based precision or positive-predictive-value (PPV) of 93.2% and an area-under-the-curve (AUC) of 0.9523. This approach enables an automated annotation procedure of large bioacoustics databases to extract killer whale sounds, which are essential for subsequent identification of significant communication patterns. The code will be publicly available in October 2019 to support the application of deep learning to bioaoucstic research. ORCA-SPOT can be adapted to other animal species

Exploring AI-assisted Ideation and Prototyping for Choreography

Choreography creation is a multimodal endeavor, demanding cognitive abilities to develop creative ideas and technical expertise to convert choreographic ideas into physical dance movements. Previous endeavors have sought to reduce the complexities in the choreography creation process in both dimensions. Among them, non-AI-based systems have focused on reinforcing cognitive activities by helping analyze and understand dance movements and augmenting physical capabilities by enhancing body expressivity. On the other hand, AI-based methods have helped the creation of novel choreographic materials with generative AI algorithms. The choreography creation process is constrained by time and requires a rich set of resources to stimulate novel ideas, but the need for iterative prototyping and reduced physical dependence have not been adequately addressed by prior research. Recognizing these challenges and the research gap, we present an innovative AI-based choreography-support system. Our goal is to facilitate rapid ideation by utilizing a generative AI model that can produce diverse and novel dance sequences. The system is designed to support iterative digital dance prototyping through an interactive web-based user interface that enables the editing and modification of generated motion. We evaluated our system by inviting six choreographers to analyze its limitations and benefits and present the evaluation results along with potential directions for future work