Data-Driven Shape Analysis and Processing

Data-driven methods play an increasingly important role in discovering geometric, structural, and semantic relationships between 3D shapes in collections, and applying this analysis to support intelligent modeling, editing, and visualization of geometric data. In contrast to traditional approaches, a key feature of data-driven approaches is that they aggregate information from a collection of shapes to improve the analysis and processing of individual shapes. In addition, they are able to learn models that reason about properties and relationships of shapes without relying on hard-coded rules or explicitly programmed instructions. We provide an overview of the main concepts and components of these techniques, and discuss their application to shape classification, segmentation, matching, reconstruction, modeling and exploration, as well as scene analysis and synthesis, through reviewing the literature and relating the existing works with both qualitative and numerical comparisons. We conclude our report with ideas that can inspire future research in data-driven shape analysis and processing.Comment: 10 pages, 19 figure

Visualising the structure of document search results: A comparison of graph theoretic approaches

This is the post-print of the article - Copyright @ 2010 Sage PublicationsPrevious work has shown that distance-similarity visualisation or ‘spatialisation’ can provide a potentially useful context in which to browse the results of a query search, enabling the user to adopt a simple local foraging or ‘cluster growing’ strategy to navigate through the retrieved document set. However, faithfully mapping feature-space models to visual space can be problematic owing to their inherent high dimensionality and non-linearity. Conventional linear approaches to dimension reduction tend to fail at this kind of task, sacrificing local structural in order to preserve a globally optimal mapping. In this paper the clustering performance of a recently proposed algorithm called isometric feature mapping (Isomap), which deals with non-linearity by transforming dissimilarities into geodesic distances, is compared to that of non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS). Various graph pruning methods, for geodesic distance estimation, are also compared. Results show that Isomap is significantly better at preserving local structural detail than MDS, suggesting it is better suited to cluster growing and other semantic navigation tasks. Moreover, it is shown that applying a minimum-cost graph pruning criterion can provide a parameter-free alternative to the traditional K-neighbour method, resulting in spatial clustering that is equivalent to or better than that achieved using an optimal-K criterion

Inducing Language Networks from Continuous Space Word Representations

Recent advancements in unsupervised feature learning have developed powerful latent representations of words. However, it is still not clear what makes one representation better than another and how we can learn the ideal representation. Understanding the structure of latent spaces attained is key to any future advancement in unsupervised learning. In this work, we introduce a new view of continuous space word representations as language networks. We explore two techniques to create language networks from learned features by inducing them for two popular word representation methods and examining the properties of their resulting networks. We find that the induced networks differ from other methods of creating language networks, and that they contain meaningful community structure.Comment: 14 page

Ariadne's Thread - Interactive Navigation in a World of Networked Information

This work-in-progress paper introduces an interface for the interactive visual exploration of the context of queries using the ArticleFirst database, a product of OCLC. We describe a workflow which allows the user to browse live entities associated with 65 million articles. In the on-line interface, each query leads to a specific network representation of the most prevailing entities: topics (words), authors, journals and Dewey decimal classes linked to the set of terms in the query. This network represents the context of a query. Each of the network nodes is clickable: by clicking through, a user traverses a large space of articles along dimensions of authors, journals, Dewey classes and words simultaneously. We present different use cases of such an interface. This paper provides a link between the quest for maps of science and on-going debates in HCI about the use of interactive information visualisation to empower users in their search.Comment: CHI'15 Extended Abstracts, April 18-23, 2015, Seoul, Republic of Korea. ACM 978-1-4503-3146-3/15/0

Alexandria: Extensible Framework for Rapid Exploration of Social Media

The Alexandria system under development at IBM Research provides an extensible framework and platform for supporting a variety of big-data analytics and visualizations. The system is currently focused on enabling rapid exploration of text-based social media data. The system provides tools to help with constructing "domain models" (i.e., families of keywords and extractors to enable focus on tweets and other social media documents relevant to a project), to rapidly extract and segment the relevant social media and its authors, to apply further analytics (such as finding trends and anomalous terms), and visualizing the results. The system architecture is centered around a variety of REST-based service APIs to enable flexible orchestration of the system capabilities; these are especially useful to support knowledge-worker driven iterative exploration of social phenomena. The architecture also enables rapid integration of Alexandria capabilities with other social media analytics system, as has been demonstrated through an integration with IBM Research's SystemG. This paper describes a prototypical usage scenario for Alexandria, along with the architecture and key underlying analytics.Comment: 8 page