SIMS 247 Final Project

Students may work individually or in pairs. If working in pairs the final report must include a description of each person's contributions.

Grading

• Project description emailed to me on time (10%)
• Class presentation of project results (must fit within designated time limits which are TBA) (15%)
• Quality of writeup of results (25%)
• Quality of actual project (50%)

Timing

• April 16: Decide on a project by no later than April 16 and report this in an email to me. This description should include descriptions of
  • Name(s) of student(s) involved
  • Project goals
  • What tools will be used to accomplish the goals
  • What steps will be required to accomplish goals
  • What kinds of results you anticipate achieving
  • What kinds of results you would like to achieve but which you probably do not have the time or the tools for.
• May 4-8: Project Presentations
• May 14: Project Writeups Due

Project Suggestions

Your Own Idea

Students are encouraged to pursue their own project ideas, as long as they have to do with information visualization and are cleared with me.

Work with Chris Healey's TexViz System (see handout)

This is a project doable by non-programmers. Chris Healey can work with up to two pairs of students. This project can involve putting a different kind of information into his system, e.g., census data or business data of some kind, or helping him evaluate some of the open problems related to his system, e.g., the effects of the orientation attribute, or evaluating the effects of assigning different perceptual attributes to different semantic attributes. See http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~healey for more information.

Work on Joe Hellerstein's Control Project

Two of Prof. Joe Hellerstein's students are working on the design of an "online" interface for gradually displaying large amounts of information as it is retrieved by a database system. Design a visualization that helps users understand the scope of the data before and while it is being displayed. (See me for more information.)

Evaluate Efficacy of a Visualization

Perform a formal evaluation that compares a visualization technique for a particular task to either another visualization or a non-visual technique. (See http://otal.umd.edu/SHORE for examples of user interface evaluations performed by students in Ben Shneiderman's HCI course.)

Design (and Implement) a Visualization

Design a visualization that solves some information display problem and/or is to be integrated into a user interface or some other system. Optionally implement the visualization. If no implementation is done, the design must be evaluated by contrasting it with at least one other design.