De/construction sites: Romans and the digital playground

The Roman world as attested to archaeologically and as interacted with today has its expression in a great many computational and other media. The place of visualisation within this has been paramount. This paper argues that the process of digitally constructing the Roman world and the exploration of the resultant models are useful methods for interpretation and influential factors in the creation of a popular Roman aesthetic. Furthermore, it suggests ways in which novel computational techniques enable the systematic deconstruction of such models, in turn re-purposing the many extant representations of Roman architecture and material culture

Animating the evolution of software

The use and development of open source software has increased significantly in the last decade. The high frequency of changes and releases across a distributed environment requires good project management tools in order to control the process adequately. However, even with these tools in place, the nature of the development and the fact that developers will often work on many other projects simultaneously, means that the developers are unlikely to have a clear picture of the current state of the project at any time. Furthermore, the poor documentation associated with many projects has a detrimental effect when encouraging new developers to contribute to the software. A typical version control repository contains a mine of information that is not always obvious and not easy to comprehend in its raw form. However, presenting this historical data in a suitable format by using software visualisation techniques allows the evolution of the software over a number of releases to be shown. This allows the changes that have been made to the software to be identified clearly, thus ensuring that the effect of those changes will also be emphasised. This then enables both managers and developers to gain a more detailed view of the current state of the project. The visualisation of evolving software introduces a number of new issues. This thesis investigates some of these issues in detail, and recommends a number of solutions in order to alleviate the problems that may otherwise arise. The solutions are then demonstrated in the definition of two new visualisations. These use historical data contained within version control repositories to show the evolution of the software at a number of levels of granularity. Additionally, animation is used as an integral part of both visualisations - not only to show the evolution by representing the progression of time, but also to highlight the changes that have occurred. Previously, the use of animation within software visualisation has been primarily restricted to small-scale, hand generated visualisations. However, this thesis shows the viability of using animation within software visualisation with automated visualisations on a large scale. In addition, evaluation of the visualisations has shown that they are suitable for showing the changes that have occurred in the software over a period of time, and subsequently how the software has evolved. These visualisations are therefore suitable for use by developers and managers involved with open source software. In addition, they also provide a basis for future research in evolutionary visualisations, software evolution and open source development

From Keyword Search to Exploration: How Result Visualization Aids Discovery on the Web

A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to improve Web search by enabling users to conveniently visualize, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. This monograph offers fresh ways to think about search-related cognitive processes and describes innovative design approaches to browsers and related tools. For instance, while key word search presents users with results for specific information (e.g., what is the capitol of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (related or previous work, conflicting information), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (group legal decisions by lead attorney). We also consider the both traditional and novel ways in which these strategies have been evaluated. From our review of cognitive processes, browser design, and evaluations, we reflect on the future opportunities and new paradigms for exploring and interacting with Web search results

TempoCave: Visualizing Dynamic Connectome Datasets to Support Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

We introduce TempoCave, a novel visualization application for analyzing dynamic brain networks, or connectomes. TempoCave provides a range of functionality to explore metrics related to the activity patterns and modular affiliations of different regions in the brain. These patterns are calculated by processing raw data retrieved functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which creates a network of weighted edges between each brain region, where the weight indicates how likely these regions are to activate synchronously. In particular, we support the analysis needs of clinical psychologists, who examine these modular affiliations and weighted edges and their temporal dynamics, utilizing them to understand relationships between neurological disorders and brain activity, which could have a significant impact on the way in which patients are diagnosed and treated. We summarize the core functionality of TempoCave, which supports a range of comparative tasks, and runs both in a desktop mode and in an immersive mode. Furthermore, we present a real-world use case that analyzes pre- and post-treatment connectome datasets from 27 subjects in a clinical study investigating the use of cognitive behavior therapy to treat major depression disorder, indicating that TempoCave can provide new insight into the dynamic behavior of the human brain

Physical Primitive Decomposition

Objects are made of parts, each with distinct geometry, physics, functionality, and affordances. Developing such a distributed, physical, interpretable representation of objects will facilitate intelligent agents to better explore and interact with the world. In this paper, we study physical primitive decomposition---understanding an object through its components, each with physical and geometric attributes. As annotated data for object parts and physics are rare, we propose a novel formulation that learns physical primitives by explaining both an object's appearance and its behaviors in physical events. Our model performs well on block towers and tools in both synthetic and real scenarios; we also demonstrate that visual and physical observations often provide complementary signals. We further present ablation and behavioral studies to better understand our model and contrast it with human performance.Comment: ECCV 2018. Project page: http://ppd.csail.mit.edu

FEAFA: A Well-Annotated Dataset for Facial Expression Analysis and 3D Facial Animation

Facial expression analysis based on machine learning requires large number of well-annotated data to reflect different changes in facial motion. Publicly available datasets truly help to accelerate research in this area by providing a benchmark resource, but all of these datasets, to the best of our knowledge, are limited to rough annotations for action units, including only their absence, presence, or a five-level intensity according to the Facial Action Coding System. To meet the need for videos labeled in great detail, we present a well-annotated dataset named FEAFA for Facial Expression Analysis and 3D Facial Animation. One hundred and twenty-two participants, including children, young adults and elderly people, were recorded in real-world conditions. In addition, 99,356 frames were manually labeled using Expression Quantitative Tool developed by us to quantify 9 symmetrical FACS action units, 10 asymmetrical (unilateral) FACS action units, 2 symmetrical FACS action descriptors and 2 asymmetrical FACS action descriptors, and each action unit or action descriptor is well-annotated with a floating point number between 0 and 1. To provide a baseline for use in future research, a benchmark for the regression of action unit values based on Convolutional Neural Networks are presented. We also demonstrate the potential of our FEAFA dataset for 3D facial animation. Almost all state-of-the-art algorithms for facial animation are achieved based on 3D face reconstruction. We hence propose a novel method that drives virtual characters only based on action unit value regression of the 2D video frames of source actors.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure