Talk Schedule

"Comparison of Travel Techniques in a Complex, Multi-Level 3D Environment"
- Evan Suma

          With the emergence of interface agents and virtual characters in everyday applications, understanding how people respond to this new medium is crucial. If social interactions with virtual humans are found to be like human to human interactions, then researchers will be able to substitute virtual humans for real people in both research and applied settings. The researches presented in this talk covers three experiments which investigate how people react to and are influenced by virtual agents.

To study both direct and indirect social influence, two paradigms (Social Facilitation and Inhibition, and Persuasion) from the field of social psychology were used to compare human to human with human to virtual human interactions. The overall conclusion is that people do respond similarly to virtual characters as they respond to real people. In fact, just like in real life interactions, gender plays a significant role in how people respond to virtual characters, more so than even the appearance of the virtual character. This talk presents empirical results from three experiments involving over 300 participants.

For more information, please visit: http://fcl.uncc.edu/czanbaka/research.htm

          We developed three two-handed selection techniques for volumetric data visualizations that use splat-based  rendering. Two techniques are bimanual asymmetric, where each hand has a different task. One technique is bimanual symmetric synchronous, where each hand performs has the same task at the same time. Another technique is bimanual symmetric asynchronous, where each hand performs has the same task at the same time or at different times. These techniques were then evaluated based on accuracy, completion times, TLX workload assessment, overall comfort and  fatigue, ease of use, and ease of learning. In addition, participants rated preferences among the techniques.

          Our results suggest that the bimanual asymmetric selection techniques are best used when performing gross    selection for potentially long periods of time and for cognitively demanding tasks. However when optimum accuracy is needed, the bimanual symmetric technique was best for selection.

For more information, please visit: http://www.cs.uncc.edu/fcl/ or http://www.AmyUlinski.com

          We conducted a study that compared three different methods of travel in a complex, multi-level virtual environment using a between-subjects design. A real walking travel technique was compared to two common virtual travel techniques. Participants explored a two-story 3D maze at their own pace and completed four post-tests requiring them to remember different aspects of the environment. Testing tasks included recall of objects from the environment, recognition of        objects present and not present, sketching of maps, and placing objects on a map. We also analyzed task completion time   and collision data captured during the experiment session. Participants that utilized the real walking technique were able to place more objects correctly on a map, completed the maze faster, and experienced fewer collisions with the environment.

         While none of the conditions outperformed each other on any other tests, our results indicate that for tasks involving  the naive exploration of a complex, multi-level 3D environment, the real walking technique supports a more efficient exploration than common virtual travel techniques. While there was a consistent trend of better performance on our measures for the real walking technique, it is not clear from our data that the benefits of real walking in these types of environments always justify the cost and space trade-offs of maintaining a wide-area tracking system.

For more information, please visit: http://www.cs.uncc.edu/fcl/

          We conducted a study to investigate the effects of using immersive virtual humans to teach users social conversational verbal and non-verbal protocols in south Indian culture. The study was conducted using a between-subjects experimental design, and compared instruction and interactive feedback from immersive virtual humans against instruction based on a written study guide with illustrations of the social protocols. Participants were then tested on how well they learned the social conversational protocols by exercising the social conventions in front of videos of real people. We also measured the participants’ pre and post positive and negative affect of training in both conditions, as well as the effect of co-presence with the life size virtual south Indians. The results of our study suggest that participants who trained with the virtual humans performed significantly better than the participants who studied from literature. The results also revealed that there was no significant difference in positive or negative affect between conditions. However, overall for all participants in both conditions, positive affect increased and negative affect decreased from before to after instruction.

For more information, please visit: http://www.cs.uncc.edu/fcl/

"The Construction and Decoration of Islamic Star Patterns"
Craig Kaplan

           As Islamic culture spread outward from the middle east starting in the seventh century, it brought with it a rich decorative tradition. Today, historical examples of Islamic art can be found in a broad swath from western Europe to the edge of China. Islamic star patterns are a wonderful and important aspect of Islamic art. Their structure is highly geometric. They are therefore an excellent candidate for analysis by modern mathematical tools, and synthesis by computational tools. They are also fascinating because most of the original design techniques are lost.

I discuss my previous and ongoing work in the construction and rendering of Islamic star patterns. I begin with some basic construction techniques based on arrangements of regular polygons. I also show how these techniques can be adapted to non-Euclidean geometry. Finally, I present recent work that systematically explores the space of rendering styles that can be applied to star patterns.

BIOGRAPHY

Craig S. Kaplan (http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/) is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he studies the relationships between Computer Graphics, art, and geometry.

"Visual Analysis of Multimedia Data"
Mohammad Ghoniem

           One of the most important applications in visual analytics has been exploratory visual analysis of large collections of unstructured text documents. However, digital media, especially those on the Internet, are multimedia in content with text, images, video, and even sound together. Furthermore, there is an explosion of broadcast and other media, especially in third world countries. Thus there is the need to extend exploratory visual analysis to large collections of multimedia. However, this requires intelligent automated analysis techniques closely integrated with interactive visualization. In the case of broadcast video, correlated image segmentation, feature identification, image flow analysis, audio analysis, and closed caption concept extraction are required. In this talk, I will discuss recent work that focuses on analyzing video news broadcasts from several channels over extended periods of time. The news segments are found automatically, and broadcasts in any language can be analyzed. The resulting multiple terabyte database can then be explored visually over time, permitting the user to follow themes as they grow or recede, compare different viewpoints on the same theme, and do many other analyses. I will discuss how this approach can be extended to other types of multimedia.

BIOGRAPHY

Mohammad Ghoniem is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Charlotte Visualization Center at UNC Charlotte and a member of the SouthEast RVAC (http://srvac.uncc.edu/) He received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Ecole des Mines de Nantes - France, his M.Sc. and Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Nantes, France. His current work bears on the visual analysis of large multimedia data.

"Storytelling Alice: presenting programming as a means to the end of storytelling"
Caitlin Kelleher

           The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) estimates that the number of incoming college students intending to major in computer science has dropped by 70% since 2000, despite the fact that the projected need for computer scientists continues to grow. Increasing the numbers of female students who pursue computer science has the potential both to help fill projected computing jobs and improve the technology we create by diversifying the viewpoints that influence technology design. Numerous studies have found that girls begin to turn away from math and science related disciplines, including computer science, during middle school. By the end of eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls are interested in pursuing science, engineering, or technology based careers.

          In this talk, I will describe the development of Storytelling Alice, a programming environment that gives middle  school girls a positive first experience with computer programming. Rather than presenting programming as an end in itself, Storytelling Alice presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling, a motivating activity for a broad spectrum of middle school girls. More than 250 girls participated in the formative user testing of Storytelling Alice. To determine girls’ storytelling needs, I observed girls interacting with successive versions of Storytelling Alice and analyzed their storyboards and the programs they developed. To enable and encourage middle school girls to create the kinds of stories they envision, Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interaction between characters, a gallery of 3D objects designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial presented using Stencils, a novel tutorial interaction technique.

          To determine the impact of the storytelling focus on girls’ interest in and success at learning to program, I conducted a study comparing the experiences of girls introduced to programming using Storytelling Alice with those of girls introduced to programming using a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic Alice). Participants who used Storytelling Alice and Generic Alice were equally successful at learning basic programming concepts. However, I found that users of Storytelling Alice show more evidence of engagement with programming. Storytelling Alice users spent 42% more time programming and were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to continue working on their programs (51% of Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra time). I will conclude by discussing future directions for introducing programming through storytelling as well as other potential contexts for storytelling.

BIOGRAPHY

Caitlin Kelleher is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with Professor Randy Pausch. Caitlin was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

"EMC²"
Scott Baker

           EMC defines virtualization as technology that provides logical representations of physical resources while preserving the usage interfaces for those resources. We see virtualization is an increasingly important area in technology, and there are a number of places in that area where we are involved. This discussion will cover the overall virtualization space, EMC’s view of it, what EMC’s technologies are, and where EMC sees the future of virtualization going.

BIOGRAPHY

Scott Baker is a software engineering manager for EMC. Prior to working for EMC, Scott co-founded a startup software development company, had the honor to work as a senior architectural software designer for NASA’s Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs, and served as an office in the United States Army. Scott received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Columbia University. Scott also received his M.B.A. in New Venture Management from the University of North Alabama.

"IT Offshoring Meets US Policy and Politics"
Bill Aspray

           The first part of the talk considers general background information about offshoring of software and IT-enabled service work from high-wage to lower-wage countries: which countries are the main client and vendor countries, why companies are offshoring, what kinds of work are getting offshored, how much offshoring is being done, various kinds of national responses to offshoring, and how politicians and economists view offshoring differently. The second part of the talk focuses on the politics and policy response in the United States. Topics include business protectionism, taxation, visas, worker safety nets, and innovation policy. This section also considers the impact of the 2006 national midterm elections and policy stances likely to be taken in the 2008 US presidential campaigns.

BIOGRAPHY

William Aspray is Rudy Professor of Informatics at Indiana University in Bloomington. He holds adjunct appointments in the School of Library and Information Science and in the History and Philosophy of Science Department. He has formerly taught at Harvard, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rutgers, Virginia Tech, and Williams in departments ranging from mathematics and computer science to history and public policy. He has also held senior management positions with the Charles Babbage Institute, Computing Research Association, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His research focuses on history, policy, and social study of information technology. He is the co-editor with Moshe Vardi and Frank Mayadas of a major study on offshoring published by the ACM in 2006.

"Coordinating Multiple Moving Objects: From Robots to Microdroplets"
Srinivas Akella

           Coordinating the collision-free motions of multiple moving objects is a challenging problem, with applications ranging from automotive workcells to lab-on-a-chip devices. I will first describe our work on the coordination of multiple robots with dynamics constraints, with applications in manufacturing cells and UAV coordination. I will discuss two variants of this problem when the paths (or trajectories) of the robots are specified: when the robots have simple double integrator dynamics, and when the robots are manipulator arms with complex dynamics, and show how to automatically generate minimum time solutions. I will then describe the coordination of microdroplets in digital microfluidic "lab-on-a-chip" systems. A digital microfluidic system controls individual droplets of chemicals on a planar array of electrodes; the chemical analysis is performed by moving, mixing, and splitting droplets. The same array can be used for multiple analyses in parallel. This promising new technology can impact processing of biochemical assays by offering tremendous flexibility and parallelism through software control. Since the simultaneous coordination of even tens of droplets on the array is extremely difficult to program manually, we have developed algorithms to automatically enable the flexible coordination of hundreds of droplets. I will discuss our ongoing work in applying these algorithms to problems in biology.

BIOGRAPHY

Srinivas Akella is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. He was a Beckman Fellow at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before joining RPI. He received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and his Ph.D. in Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award. His research interests are in robotic motion and manipulation planning, and in developing algorithms for applications in automation, microsystems, and bioinformatics.

"Mining the Tinnitus Data"
Pamela L. Thompson

           Tinnitus affects about 17% of the population and is generally considered to be an auditory phantom perception or auditory hallucination. Tinnitus is frequently accompanied by decreased sound tolerance, fear of sounds, and hearing loss. Dr. Pawel Jastreboff, Ph.D., Sc.D. (Emory University, Atlanta) has been instrumental in creating Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, a treatment that is 80% successful in curing tinnitus. Dr. Jastreboff has maintained a large database of patient and treatment information, and this database is being extracted, transformed, and analyzed in order to learn more about the relationship of emotions, sound therapy, medications, and other features to treatment success. This talk will include an introduction to tinnitus, a review of the data and the preparation necessary for analysis, and preliminary findings based on various data mining techniques.

BIOGRAPHY

Pamela Thompson is Associate Professor of Business and Information Systems, and Department Chair of the Ralph W. Ketner School of Business at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC. She holds a BBA and MBA (Information Systems) from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She has worked as a programmer, systems analyst, and business/technology consultant. She is currently working on her doctoral degree at UNC Charlotte; her research focuses on KDD.