8,523 research outputs found
Guidelines for the presentation and visualisation of lifelog content
Lifelogs offer rich voluminous sources of personal and
social data for which visualisation is ideally suited to providing access, overview, and navigation. We explore through examples of our visualisation work within the domain of lifelogging the major axes on which lifelogs operate, and therefore, on which their visualisations should be contingent. We also explore the concept of âeventsâ as a way to significantly reduce the complexity of the lifelog for presentation and make it more human-oriented. Finally we present some guidelines and goals which should be considered when designing presentation modes for lifelog conten
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
Radial Velocity Prospects Current and Future: A White Paper Report prepared by the Study Analysis Group 8 for the Exoplanet Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG)
[Abridged] The Study Analysis Group 8 of the NASA Exoplanet Analysis Group
was convened to assess the current capabilities and the future potential of the
precise radial velocity (PRV) method to advance the NASA goal to "search for
planetary bodies and Earth-like planets in orbit around other stars.: (U.S.
National Space Policy, June 28, 2010). PRVs complement other exoplanet
detection methods, for example offering a direct path to obtaining the bulk
density and thus the structure and composition of transiting exoplanets. Our
analysis builds upon previous community input, including the ExoPlanet
Community Report chapter on radial velocities in 2008, the 2010 Decadal Survey
of Astronomy, the Penn State Precise Radial Velocities Workshop response to the
Decadal Survey in 2010, and the NSF Portfolio Review in 2012. The
radial-velocity detection of exoplanets is strongly endorsed by both the Astro
2010 Decadal Survey "New Worlds, New Horizons" and the NSF Portfolio Review,
and the community has recommended robust investment in PRVs. The demands on
telescope time for the above mission support, especially for systems of small
planets, will exceed the number of nights available using instruments now in
operation by a factor of at least several for TESS alone. Pushing down towards
true Earth twins will require more photons (i.e. larger telescopes), more
stable spectrographs than are currently available, better calibration, and
better correction for stellar jitter. We outline four hypothetical situations
for PRV work necessary to meet NASA mission exoplanet science objectives.Comment: ExoPAG SAG 8 final report, 112 pages, fixed author name onl
Interactive polar diagrams for model comparison
Objective
Evaluating the performance of multiple complex models, such as those found in biology, medicine, climatology, and machine learning, using conventional approaches is often challenging when using various evaluation metrics simultaneously. The traditional approach, which relies on presenting multi-model evaluation scores in the table, presents an obstacle when determining the similarities between the models and the order of performance.
Methods
By combining statistics, information theory, and data visualization, juxtaposed Taylor and Mutual Information Diagrams permit users to track and summarize the performance of one model or a collection of different models. To uncover linear and nonlinear relationships between models, users may visualize one or both charts.
Results
Our library presents the first publicly available implementation of the Mutual Information Diagram and its new interactive capabilities, as well as the first publicly available implementation of an interactive Taylor Diagram. Extensions have been implemented so that both diagrams can display temporality, multimodality, and multivariate data sets, and feature one scalar model property such as uncertainty. Our library, named polar-diagrams, supports both continuous and categorical attributes.
Conclusion
The library can be used to quickly and easily assess the performances of complex models, such as those found in machine learning, climate, or biomedical domains
Semiparametric measurement of environmental effects
This paper gives the results of a semiparametric analysis of pollution effects on housing prices using the Boston Housing Data. The exposition introduces the basic ideas of modeling pollution impacts with hedonic price methods, discusses the standard log-linear model, and then introduces nonparametric estimation and semiparametric index models. We focus on the intuitive content and substantive results of the semiparametric analysis. We find that the impact of pollution is smaller than that previously estimated, and varies dramatically depending on the status level of the community. We give various interpretations of the findings, and contrast our methods with those used in previous analysis of the Boston Housing Data.Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research
The Grid Dependence of Well Inflow Performance in Reservoir Simulation
Imperial Users onl
Augmenting biological pathway extraction with synthetic data and active learning
The corpus of biomedical literature is growing rapidly as many papers are recorded in PubMed every day. These papers often contain high-quality biological pathways in their figures/text, which are great resources for studying biological mechanisms and precision medicine. However, it can take a long time for many of these works to be put into practical use as each paper's contributions need to be curated by experts. This, often lengthy, process causes professional practice to lag behind research. To speed up this process, I helped develop a pipeline that integrates NLP and object detection processing to extract gene relationships reported in articles' figures and text. This pipeline was able to extract such relationships with high precision and recall on a small, annotated set. However, extending this pipeline for improved generalization and new settings was limited by the number of high-quality annotations available. Such labeled data is very time consuming to collect and traditional augmentations were observed to generate diminishing returns. To address this shortcoming, I developed an approach for generating purely synthetic data for object detection on biological pathway diagrams based on a set of rules and domain knowledge. Our method iteratively generates each pathway relationship uniquely and is demonstrated to improve the generalization of our object detection model significantly across a variety of settings. Additionally, with the capability to generate unique and informative samples, we integrated our synthetic generation methodology into an active learning setting. While traditional active learning relies on a pool of unlabeled data to draw from with an acquisition function, our method is pool-less and does not require any acquisition function. Instead, we generate each batch of data uniquely based on the training losses from the previous batch. Pool-less Active Learning (PAL) via synthetic data generation is demonstrated to reduce the number of iterations required for model convergence during training on pathway figures.Includes bibliographical references
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