Category: Science

I attended the EuroVis 2013 in Leipzig this week. It is the largest european conference on visualization. In my post about the annual meeting of the BZS I wrote that for scientific collaborations the small meetings are the best. An that is true. The EuroVis is nice, but is very hard to get in touch with people you don’t already know. But that is not a problem. The large conferences have other qualities.

The large conferences provide you with a good overview of the current state of the art in the corresponding field of science. They seek to select papers of high quality and, therefore, to present the most important scientific results. I don’t want to bad-mouth anyone or anything. There are always good papers and there are always paper I can only stand by, stare at and ask myself: WTF?

And that was exactly the case this year again. There were some good papers and I took some good ideas with me. Let’s see what I can make out of these.

This week I participated in the V. annual meeting of the Boltzmann Zuse Society for Computational Molecular Engineering in Kaiserslautern. For scientific collaborations the small conferences are the best! This year, again, we discussed a lot of interesting ideas and topics. I took a whole bunch of them home with me.

In addition I got news (Tuesday night) which make me unbelievably angry. I won’t write any details before I don’t know the whole extend of the consequences. Maybe next week …

I honestly believe that I should do less programming. Especially I should not write solutions for problems other people alread wrote solutions for.

Therefore, I decided to get rid of my self-written publication list code.

First I registered for Mendeley. My publications were found or entered quickly. Everything was fine. I installed the WP plugin. Sadly the publication list was not usable at all. Within a reasonable amount of time (some minutes) I was not able to activate copiable bibtex for the entries.

So I switched to BibSonomy. Their search did only find less of my publications and I needed to enter more myself (which, however, was also done very quickly). Then there was that WP plugin. pitty. After installation I could not activate it due to an critical error. …

Why was I not writing the code myself again?

The simplest solutions often are the best. I tested the Papercite plugin. Maintaining and uploading a simple bib file should be possible for me. The publication list was created easily and is (almost) what I want. Not rocket science but does what it promises. Event citing my papers in my blog posts or web sites work instantly.

I thus found a 90% solution for my problem, which is enough I suppose.

Early this week I was participating at the workshop Molecular Modeling and Simulation. I spent these two days with physicists, chemists and engineering scientists. Being a computer scientist and visualization researcher I felt a bit exotic there, but I found it very exciting to see the current state of the art of these research fields. And, after giving my presentation I got very positive feedback that my current work was also very interesting for the audience.

Visualization research is great. You can do so many things, and you should do so many things. The only problem is that often huge technical challenges must be overcome before you can work on the actual research question. A lot of effort, work and time, is thus infested in parts of the software, which seem not to do anything good for you scientific career. This is kind of frustrating sometimes.

In our workgroup we are currently discussing the presentation of our research and the definition of topics for student theses (e.g. for bachelor, master, or diploma). Therefore, each member of our workgroup lists his/hers personal research interests.

Here are mine:

• Scientific visualization
  • No volume rendering and no flow visualization (there are enough other people doing that)
  • Visualization of particle-based data, e.g. from molecular dynamics (continuation of my Ph.D. thesis, becaue there are enough open questions left)
  • Efficient rendering and high visual quality
  • Development of new abstract visual methophors to aid the understanding of the data
• Visualization of dynamic data
  • Not restricted to data from classical scientific visualization, but also for abstract data known from information visualization
  • Even data from high dimensional spaces (mostly spaces with “geometric” properties, e.g. physical phase spaces)
  • Visual analysis of dynamic properties through static representations
• Softwaren engineering for visualization research prototypes
  • For publications almost every time only proof-of-concept prototypes are written; quick and dirty, which makes is almost impossible to maintain them
  • For large scientific projects often larger software is required
  • Large software in the academia almost always failes. Why?

Of course, I am also interested in a lot of other things, practically almost everything. But one has to focus, right. Well, these three topics are such wide, that it should not be called a focus. Whatever. I call it that way. This is my research focus.

Today, I want to write about the project I am working in: the Junior Research Group VICCI

VICCI stands for “Visual and Interactive Cyber-physical systems Control and Integration”.

Core topic are the Cyber-Physcial Systems (short: CPS). Ask ten people what CPS are and you will get ten answers. It is just not clear yet. Here is my opinion:

CPS are “smart”, (semi-)autonome systems (networks) of elements (embedded systems) which have both, a real-world object (e.g. sensors or actuators) as well as a virtuell object (image of data in software). The interconnected elements together form a system capable of optimizing and adapting itself, supporting or performing processes in the real world.

Well, this description is not really clear, is it. Maybe like this: CPS are “automation 3.0”. While classical automation only uses simple control loops or are just remote controls, CPS can optimize and adapt their control mechanisms by themselves. Typical buzzwords are “Smart Factory”, “Smart Grid”, “Smart Office”, “Smart Home”, etc. It is always the idea that the surrounding “thinks along”.

In the VICCI project we follow the scenario of a “smart home”, an apartment which is thinking along and which supports it’s residents. For example, simple transportation or search tasks can be handled. Our CPS consist of sensors and actuators. The sensors are placed in a computer lab which will represent our model-apartment. We have sensores for temperature, light, humidity, cameras, etc. As actuators we have robots which are exemplary for service robots. You remember I, Robot. We (scientists) are working on it ;-)

My field of work with our group is (in addition to coordination and administrative tasks) the visualization of CPS, more precisely, the internal state of the CPS. I create visualizations for analyzing: “What does the CPS think?” First results exist, but are not published yet. As soon as they are, I will write about them here.

I want to use my website to present myself and my work. Therefore, I created a list of my scientific publications. It is currently a quick and dirty list only, but it is a start.

What a week.

The deadline for paper submission for the EuroVis 2013 was this weekend. I wanted to submit my current work there, and therefore the motto for this week was: “paper writing and polishing”. Hard work! And now I am curious about the results. I am satisfied with my results, but, of course, the reviewers have to be satisfied as well. And a bit of luck is required as well, as there is strong competition.

However, because the double blind reviewing process is now running, I, of course, cannot write about this work here (yet).

I decided to write more about my “work” here.

I am doing research in the field of interactive Visualization of large data sets from scientific sources, like physical simulations. Additionally, I am interested in the visual analysis of abstract but structured data, like graphs. I focus on efficient representation and exploration.

Currently I am employed as PostDoc at the Technical University Dresden at the Computer Graphics and Visualization lab. Next up I will post and discuss some of my older works here.