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: 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: 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!