Ross’ PhD Blog Memex

• Currently Listening to: Barenaked Ladies — It’s All Been Done

A literature review is a standard part of any postgraduate’s endeavours, and usually makes up the majority of your first year or two. A good review sets up the landscape that you’re going to work within, saving you from duplicating effort and allowing you to identify the key players in your field. You don’t necessarily have to reel off a big document summarising your reading, but if you do it’s a fine head start on the first chunk of your thesis.

I had started my lit review last year, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of merely printing and filing papers without having read them. Then, in December at our second annual SRG-fest Joe gave an inspiring talk about structuring a literature review intelligently. Among his suggestions were to choose a handful of key conferences in your area and read every paper published in their proceedings for the last few years. For me, these conferences are places like InfoVis, ICAC, Pervasive and CHI.

Secondly he suggested building up a “mindmap” of the research areas that you’re actively engaging in. This has proven to be a very worthy excercise.

My (intimidating!) PhD mindmap

When drawn up like this my research interests seem both nicely structured but also worryingly broad. And I left out the stuff I’ll likely need to understand but currently have no interest in, like semantics, embedded systems and parallelism. My reading has been branching out a bit recently too; since I’ve started tracking my bookmarks on del.icio.us I discovered that I’m actually more interested in things like sociology and psychology than I thought.

If you imagine all the possible research that could be done in our field as a pie chart, the area I’m going to explore will end up being a thin sliver in that chart. Aaron always said that his job as my supervisor was to keep me anchored in that segment and not wander too far outside of it. Looks like he’s got his work cut out for him.

• Currently Listening to: Phoenix — Too Young

I attended the workshop on Software Engineering Challenges for Ubiquitous Computing (SEUC 2006) in Lancaster, presided over by Gerd Kortuem.

After a somewhat hurried paper submission about using AOP in automotive software, I decided to change tack, so my presentation was about what kind of problems software engineers in the automotive space are facing. Admittedly I wasn’t presenting any answers, but my presentation went well and, being the only presenter discussing automotive systems and autonomics explicitly, I got a number of interesting questions which created a good discussion.

Software Considerations for Automotive Pervasive Systems Talk given at SEUC2006, June 1–2, Lancaster UK.

Here’s an excerpt from my talk:

The modern car is a highly sensorial, complex pervasive system, with thousands of sensors and actuators and hundreds of microcontrollers controlling almost all aspects of the car’s operation; from the multimedia & entertainment systems (radio, DVD players) and navigation/mapping software, to communication both to the outside world and also on a more limited scale to other cars nearby on the road.

Finally, and most importantly, are the car’s safety systems. Most of the impetus for adding so much software to cars is the supposed benefits to driver safety. And when it works, this is great, but we must also recognise that the stakes are higher. There are dangers involved that most pervasive systems don’t have to be concerned with.

System Personalisation

Much of the talk and discussion involved the implications of personalisation in automotive systems. In the future and to an extent even now, you can choose which features you want your car to come shipped with. This is likely to increase in scale over time, so that a car’s base configuration can be permuted in thousands of ways for each buyer. Modules need to be unobtrusively integrated and interoperable.

Layered on top of this is the possibility of a car being modified, upgraded or damaged over time. Cars will have to be able to adapt to whatever components they have installed, and thus, there is a lot of autonomic computing involved.

Questions & Answers

A few brief (paraphrased) questions and answers that I remembered to write down (not guaranteed to be correct!):

Will hardware and software become increasingly decoupled in automotive systems?

This doesn’t seem to be the way it’s going. As far as I can see (and this was backed up at the workshop), the hardware and software systems seem to be getting more tightly coupled if anything.

What is the development process at the car OEMs?

I couldn’t answer this, but someone else stepped in and suggested that a lot of OEM’s in-house teams are actually graviating towards being software-only development houses, with hardware being contracted out to other companies.

Does the drive-by-wire filtering of a user’s input spoil the love of driving?

Not really a research question, but interesting nonetheless. I do wonder how many drivers could honestly say they’d prefer the primal thrill of risky, unrestricted driving over the increased safety and stability benefits of these modern cars.

• Currently Listening to: Albert Niland — Wuthering Heights

Say hello to my little friends.

I got word in April that my first paper, the alluringly-titled “Collaborating in Context: Immersive Visualisation Environments” which I submitted in March to the Context in Advanced Interfaces workshop at AVI06, had been accepted. So, Mark, Mike and I headed off to Venice for the week to watch presentations, ride around on boats and eat octopuses.

The paper concerns the design and development of our unique visualization lab here in UCD. My presentation at the workshop went fairly well, considering I had completed a cross-city dash minutes before starting (Venice is a big place!). My slides are available with the others at the workshop’s results page. My paper has been published in the ACM digital library.

AVI 06 proper was an excellent conference, with plenty of interesting work going on, and people to meet. My trip report is available:

Trip Report: AVI 2006 May 23–26, Venice Italy

Our own photos are online, and you can also check out the very lovely Geoffrey Ellis’ AVI photos (spot the goons!).

• Currently Listening to: Kate Bush — Cloudbusting

As part of the new structured PhD program in operation in CSI, we all have to give a talk on something relevant to our research.

I chose/it was suggested to me to present “fisheye” visualizations, a technique described by George Furnas in his seminal paper “Generalised Fisheye Views”, and the 20 years on review paper, “A Fisheye Follow-up: Further Reflections on Focus + Context”. This is a really interesting data filtering approach (and not a visual technique as the name might imply).

The talk seems to have gone down well, which is nice, as I have some workshop talks coming up later this month. Creating this presentation, the first I’ve given since I left IBM last September, has proven to be very good practise for preparing a talk, and then — erk! — fielding questions. My slides are linked below.

Talk: Information Visualization
Using View & Data Distortion

And here are some of the things I learned from my presentation:

1. Never, ever try and say “specificity” out loud in front of other people. That is all.

• Currently Listening to: The Strokes — Trying Your Luck

So, I got my first paper finished and submitted in time to a workshop at AVI 2006 entitled “Context in Advanced Interfaces.” Worked all the way up to 15 minutes before the deadline (which I’m told is “decent buffer”). An arduous but rewarding experience, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of our terrific support structures in the SRG, namely our academics and postdocs. As Lorcan put it so nicely, “Welcome to the anti-rat race dude.”

Update 2006/04/08: Got ‘er in.

• Currently Listening to: Modest Mouse — Float On

This paper describes visualising the process of looking after a medical patient, using multiple, simultaneous, tightly-coupled views.

@inproceedings{1019226,
 author = {Wolfgang Aigner and Silvia Miksch},
 title = {Supporting Protocol-Based Care in Medicine
   via Multiple Coordinated Views},
 booktitle = {CMV '04: Proceedings of the Second International
   Conference on Coordinated \& Multiple Views in Exploratory
   Visualization (CMV'04)},
 year = {2004},
 isbn = {0-7695-2179-7},
 pages = {118--129},
 doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CMV.2004.19},
 publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
 address = {Washington, DC, USA},
}

Though the middle sections of this paper do not have much specifically to do with my own field of visualisation, they do contain a lot of good passages on visualisation techniques. Visualising time-orientated data is particularly interesting. They refer to the somewhat misleadingly named “fisheye view”, in which the focused element is enlarged and centred, and all other elements are distorted by shrinking and moving them outwards, which is a nice way to better make use of display space.

There is also a good introduction to using multiple simultaneous views, each focusing on different aspects of the data. They go about this by splitting the display area into a Logical View and a Temporal View. This approach could also be used to visualise sensor data — in effect explicitly denoting the scientific and information visualisation aspects.

There is also a section on setting up a user study to ascertain the needs, general practices and expectations of seasoned medical professionals. This is relevant as I may well have to set up some testing time with domain experts to test if our new visualisation environment is indeed more useful for collaboration than the way things are currently done.

The characteristics that the doctors and other staff identified as being important in such a system were non-surprising: intuitive interactions, a clean interface and flexibility were all mentioned. Designing for domain experts also raises a new point: the system will have to include a means for data input, which is a part of the UI that I hadn’t given much thought before.

• Currently Listening to: Queen & David Bowie — Under Pressure

Of course, in the time it took me to colour this in, I could’ve written ten papers…

• Currently Listening to: Arcade Fire — Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)

No, not the as-yet-unknown-quantity that is the paper I’m trying to put together for AVI 2006. I just got word from one of the editors at O’Reilly that the book I contributed to, PHP Hacks, has been published and is in shops. I should be getting my ‘author copy’ in the post over the next few days. Huzzah!

A very interesting paper, given how long ago it was written. Though informal, this was inspiring. The examples of possible pervasive systems — the vast majority of which have not yet been implemented — seem to have had a large impact on future ‘thinkers’.

@article{213017,
  author = {Mark Weiser},
  title = {The computer for the 21st century},
  book = {Human-computer interaction: toward the year 2000},
  year = {1995},
  isbn = {1-55860-246-1},
  pages = {933--940},
  publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.},
  address = {San Francisco, CA, USA},
}