Health Figures: An Open Source JavaScript Library for Health Data Visualization

The way we look at data has a great impact on how we can understand it, particularly when the data is related to health and wellness. Due to the increased use of self-tracking devices and the ongoing shift towards preventive medicine, better understanding of our health data is an important part of improving the general welfare of the citizens. Electronic Health Records, self-tracking devices and mobile applications provide a rich variety of data but it often becomes difficult to understand. We implemented the hFigures library inspired on the hGraph visualization with additional improvements. The purpose of the library is to provide a visual representation of the evolution of health measurements in a complete and useful manner. We researched the usefulness and usability of the library by building an application for health data visualization in a health coaching program. We performed a user evaluation with Heuristic Evaluation, Controlled User Testing and Usability Questionnaires. In the Heuristics Evaluation the average response was 6.3 out of 7 points and the Cognitive Walkthrough done by usability experts indicated no design or mismatch errors. In the CSUQ usability test the system obtained an average score of 6.13 out of 7, and in the ASQ usability test the overall satisfaction score was 6.64 out of 7. We developed hFigures, an open source library for visualizing a complete, accurate and normalized graphical representation of health data. The idea is based on the concept of the hGraph but it provides additional key features, including a comparison of multiple health measurements over time. We conducted a usability evaluation of the library as a key component of an application for health and wellness monitoring. The results indicate that the data visualization library was helpful in assisting users in understanding health data and its evolution over time.Comment: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 16.1 (2016

3D Data Processing Toward Maintenance and Conservation. The Integrated Digital Documentation of Casa de Vidro

During the last decade, 3D integrated surveys and BIM modelling procedures have greatly improved the overall knowledge on some Brazilian Modernist buildings. In this framework, the Casa de Vidro 3D survey carried out by DIAPReM centre at Ferrara University, beside the important outputs, analysis and researches achieved from the point cloud database processing, was also useful to test several awareness increasing activities in cooperation with local stakeholders. The first digital documentation test of the Casa de Vidro allowed verifying the feasibility of a full survey on the building towards the restoration and possible placement of new architectures into the garden as an archive-museum of the Lina Bo and P.M. Bardi Foundation. Later, full 3D integrated survey and diagnostic analysis were carried out to achieve the total digital documentation of the house sponsored by the Keeping it Modern initiative of Getty Foundation (Los Angeles). Following its characteristics, the survey had to take into consideration the different architectural features, up to the relationship of architecture and nature. These 3D documentation activities and the point cloud processing allowed several analysis in a multidisciplinary framework

Digital system of quarry management as a SAAS solution: mineral deposit module

Purpose. Improving the efficiency of functioning the mining enterprises and aggregation of earlier obtained results into a unified digital system of designing and operative management by quarry operation. Methods. Both the traditional (analysis of scientific and patent literature, analytical methods of deposit parameters research, analysis of experience and exploitation of quarries, conducting the passive experiment and processing the statistical data) and new forms of scientific research - deposit modeling on the basis of classical and neural network methods of approximation – are used in the work. For the purpose of the software product realization on the basis of cloud technologies, there were used: for back-end implementation – server-based scripting language php; for the front-end – multi-paradigm programming language javascript, javascript framework jQuery and asynchronous data exchange technology Ajax. Findings. The target audience of the system has been identified, SWOT-analysis has been carried out, conceptual directions of 3D-quarry system development have been defined. The strategies of development and promotion of the software product, as well as the strategies of safety and reliability of the application both for the client and the owner of the system have been formulated. The modular structure of the application has been developed, and the system functions have been divided to implement both back-end and front-end applications. The Mineral Deposit Module has been developed: the geological structure of the deposit has been simulated and its block model has been constructed. It has been proved that the use of neural network algorithms does not give an essential increase in the accuracy of the block model for the deposits of 1 and 2 groups in terms of the geological structure complexity. The possibility and prospects of constructing the systems for subsoil users on the basis of cloud technologies and the concept of SaaS have been substantiated. Originality. For the first time, the modern software products for solving the problems of designing and operational management of mining operations have been successfully developed on the basis of the SaaS concept. Practical implications. The results are applicable for enterprises-subsoil users, working with deposits of 1 and 2 groups in terms of the geological structure complexity: design organizations, as well as mining and processing plants.Мета. Підвищення ефективності функціонування гірничорудних підприємств та агрегація раніше отриманих результатів в єдину цифрову систему проектування і оперативного управління роботою кар’єрів. Методика. У роботі використані як традиційні (аналіз науково-патентної літератури, аналітичні методи дослідження параметрів родовища, аналіз досвіду й експлуатації кар’єрів, проведення пасивного експерименту та статистичної обробки даних), так і нові форми наукового дослідження – моделювання родовища на основі класичних і нейромережевих методів апроксимації. Для реалізації програмного продукту на основі хмарних технологій використані: для реалізації back-end – серверна скриптова мова програмування php; для front-end – мультипарадігменна мова програмування javascript, javascript framework jQuery і технологія асинхронного обміну даними Ajax. Результати. Виявлено цільову аудиторію системи, проведено SWOT-аналіз, визначено концептуальні напрями розвитку системи 3D-кар’єр, розроблені стратегії розвитку та просування програмного продукту, розроблені стратегії безпеки й надійності додатки як для клієнта, так і власника системи. Розроблено модульну структуру програми, вироблено розподіл функцій системи для реалізації як back-end і front-end додатки. Розроблено модуль “Родовище”: проведено моделювання геологічної структури родовища та побудована його блокова модель. Доведено, що використання нейромережевих алгоритмів не дає принципового підвищення точності блокової моделі для родовищ 1 і 2 груп за складністю геологічної будови. Виявлено недоліки нейромережевих алгоритмів, такі як високі витрати обчислювальних ресурсів сервера і проблеми візуалізації великих масивів геоданих при використанні web-рішень, знайдені шляхи їх вирішення. Доведено можливість і перспективність побудови систем для надрокористувачів на основі хмарних технологій і концепції SaaS. Наукова новизна. Вперше на основі концепції ASP успішно побудовані сучасні програмні продукти для вирішення завдань проектування та оперативного керування гірничими роботами. Практична значимість. Результати корисні для підприємств-надрокористувачів, які працюють з родовищами 1 і 2 груп за складністю геологічної будови – проектних організацій і ГЗК.Цель. Повышение эффективности функционирования горнорудных предприятий и агрегация ранее полученных результатов в единую цифровую систему проектирования и оперативного управления работой карьеров. Методика. В работе использованы как традиционные (анализ научно-патентной литературы, аналитические методы исследования параметров месторождения, анализ опыта и эксплуатации карьеров, проведение пассивного эксперимента и статистической обработкой данных), так и новые формы научного исследования – моделирование месторождения на основе классических и нейросетевых методов аппроксимации. Для реализации программного продукта на основе облачных технологий использованы: для реализации back-end – серверный скриптовый язык программирования php; для front-end – мультипарадигменный язык программирования javascript, javascript framework jQuery и технология асинхронного обмена данными Ajax. Результаты. Выявлена целевая аудитория системы, проведен SWOT-анализ, определены концептуальные направления развития системы 3D-карьер, разработаны стратегии развития и продвижения программного продукта, разработаны стратегии безопасности и надежности приложения как для клиента, так и владельца системы. Разработана модульная структура приложения, произведено деление функций системы для реализации как back-end и front-end приложения. Разработан модуль “Месторождение”: проведено моделирование геологической структуры месторождения и построена его блочная модель. Доказано, что использование нейросетевых алгоритмов не дает принципиального повышения точности блочной модели для месторождений 1 и 2 групп по сложности геологического строения. Выявлены недостатки нейросетевых алгоритмов, такие как высокие затраты вычислительных ресурсов сервера и проблемы визуализации больших массивов геоданных при использовании web-решений, найдены пути их решения. Доказана возможность и перспективность построения систем для недропользователей на основе облачных технологий и концепции SaaS. Научная новизна. Впервые на основе концепции ASP успешно построены современные программные продукты для решения задач проектирования и оперативного управления горными работами. Практическая значимость. Результаты применимы для предприятий-недропользователей, работающих с месторождениями 1 и 2 групп по сложности геологического строения – проектных организаций и ГОКов.We express our profound gratitude to A.B. Naizabekov for his assistance in scientific research, to A.F. Tsekhovoy, P.A. Tsekhovoy, D.Sh. Akhmedov, V. V. Yankovenko and D.V. Nikitas for scientific advice in implementation of the program code. The research was carried out within the framework of the initiative research theme “Improving the Efficiency of Mining Enterprises” on the basis of the RSE at the Rudny Industrial Institute of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan

Online visualization of bibliography Using Visualization Techniques

Visualization is a concept where we can represent some raw data in the form of graphs, images, charts, etc. which will be very helpful for the end-user to correlate and be able to understand the relationships between the data elements in a single screen. Representing the bibliographic information of the computer science journals and proceedings using Visualization technique would help user choose a particular author and navigate through the hierarchy and find out what papers the author has published, the keywords of the papers, what papers cite them, the co-authors along with the main author, and how many papers are published by the author selected by the user and so on in a single page. These information is right now present in a scattered manner and the user has to search on websites like Google Scholar [1], Cite Seer [2] to get these bibliographic records. By the use of visualization techniques, all the information can be accessed on a single page by having a graph like points on the page, where the user can search for a particular author and the author and its co-authors are represented in the form of points. The goal of this project is to enhance current bibliography web services with an intuitive interactive visualization interface and to improve user understanding and conceptualization. In this project, we develop a simple web-interface which will take a search query from the user and find the related information like author\u27s name, the co-authors, number of papers published by him, related keywords, citations referred etc. The project uses the bibliographic records which are available as XML files from the Citeseer database[2], extracts the data into the database and then queries the database for the results using a web service. The data which is extracted is then presented visually to allow the user to conceptualize the results in a better way and help him/her find the articles of interest with utmost ease. In addition the user can interactively navigate the visual results to get more information about any of the article or the author displayed. So here we present both paper centric view and author centric view to the user by representing data in terms of graphs. The nodes in the graphs obtained for paper centric views and author centric views are color coded based on the paper’s weight parameter ( popularity of the paper ). For the paper centric view, the papers which are referring other papers are represented by providing a directed arrow from referred paper to referenced paper. Overall the idea here was to represent this related data in the form of a tree, so that the user can correlate all the data and get the relationships between them

Semiautomated Skeletonization of the Pulmonary Arterial Tree in Micro-CT Images

We present a simple and robust approach that utilizes planar images at different angular rotations combined with unfiltered back-projection to locate the central axes of the pulmonary arterial tree. Three-dimensional points are selected interactively by the user. The computer calculates a sub- volume unfiltered back-projection orthogonal to the vector connecting the two points and centered on the first point. Because more x-rays are absorbed at the thickest portion of the vessel, in the unfiltered back-projection, the darkest pixel is assumed to be the center of the vessel. The computer replaces this point with the newly computer-calculated point. A second back-projection is calculated around the original point orthogonal to a vector connecting the newly-calculated first point and user-determined second point. The darkest pixel within the reconstruction is determined. The computer then replaces the second point with the XYZ coordinates of the darkest pixel within this second reconstruction. Following a vector based on a moving average of previously determined 3- dimensional points along the vessel\u27s axis, the computer continues this skeletonization process until stopped by the user. The computer estimates the vessel diameter along the set of previously determined points using a method similar to the full width-half max algorithm. On all subsequent vessels, the process works the same way except that at each point, distances between the current point and all previously determined points along different vessels are determined. If the difference is less than the previously estimated diameter, the vessels are assumed to branch. This user/computer interaction continues until the vascular tree has been skeletonized

Data Visualization Tools for Science and Math

As the computers available in schools become more powerful, more and more exciting tools are available to science and math students and teachers. Visualization tools, such as image processing, geographic information systems, modeling, and simulation software, are a class of tools with particular promise. These tools are being used in schools across the country to integrate computer use with the curriculum and to bring more hands-on inquiry to the students. A primary goal of using these computer-based tools is to aid students in developing a deeper understanding of the science and math (not the computers) and to help make difficult concepts a little easier to grasp (and visualize). In particular, these tools allow students to collect, analyze, and manipulate data, a fundamental requirement of the Virginia Standards of Learning [1]. More importantly, these tools allow students with a variety of different learning styles, especially visual learners, to help make abstract concepts into concrete expressions. Teachers can use the computers as a laboratory to study phenomena they could never fit into their classroom (like remote sensing of Earth to study land use and geology from space). One of the challenges in bringing these tools to students is how to do the faculty development to bring the tools to teachers. In this session, we\u27ll explore the possibilities that these tools offer, examine the challenges, and try to understand how to prepare future teachers to use these and other tools in their classrooms

Visual analytics for supply network management: system design and evaluation

We propose a visual analytic system to augment and enhance decision-making processes of supply chain managers. Several design requirements drive the development of our integrated architecture and lead to three primary capabilities of our system prototype. First, a visual analytic system must integrate various relevant views and perspectives that highlight different structural aspects of a supply network. Second, the system must deliver required information on-demand and update the visual representation via user-initiated interactions. Third, the system must provide both descriptive and predictive analytic functions for managers to gain contingency intelligence. Based on these capabilities we implement an interactive web-based visual analytic system. Our system enables managers to interactively apply visual encodings based on different node and edge attributes to facilitate mental map matching between abstract attributes and visual elements. Grounded in cognitive fit theory, we demonstrate that an interactive visual system that dynamically adjusts visual representations to the decision environment can significantly enhance decision-making processes in a supply network setting. We conduct multi-stage evaluation sessions with prototypical users that collectively confirm the value of our system. Our results indicate a positive reaction to our system. We conclude with implications and future research opportunities.The authors would like to thank the participants of the 2015 Businessvis Workshop at IEEE VIS, Prof. Benoit Montreuil, and Dr. Driss Hakimi for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of the software; Prof. Manpreet Hora for assisting with and Georgia Tech graduate students for participating in the evaluation sessions; and the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions. The study was in part supported by the Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech Award # K9305. (K9305 - Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech Award)Accepted manuscrip

Spectroscopic Analysis in the Virtual Observatory Environment with SPLAT-VO

SPLAT-VO is a powerful graphical tool for displaying, comparing, modifying and analyzing astronomical spectra, as well as searching and retrieving spectra from services around the world using Virtual Observatory (VO) protocols and services. The development of SPLAT-VO started in 1999, as part of the Starlink StarJava initiative, sometime before that of the VO, so initial support for the VO was necessarily added once VO standards and services became available. Further developments were supported by the Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii until 2009. Since end of 2011 development of SPLAT-VO has been continued by the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory, and the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. From this time several new features have been added, including support for the latest VO protocols, along with new visualization and spectra storing capabilities. This paper presents the history of SPLAT-VO, it's capabilities, recent additions and future plans, as well as a discussion on the motivations and lessons learned up to now.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Computin

The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives

The Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building -- all proceeding concurrently in mutually --reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from over two hundred users, totaling around 300 terabytes of web archives.This research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, the University of Waterloo, and York University. We’d like to thank Jeremy Wiebe, Ryan Deschamps, and Gursimran Singh for their contributions