The semester project is a major emphasis of the course. The project provides an opportunity to integrate and practice the concepts from the all parts of the class. Students will work in groups to address an existing problem, design and evaluate a potential solution, and implement a final software product.
Your first step is to form a Team of 4 students, and to identify the topic of your project. You are free to form teams as you please. You can announce in class if you need a team or need additional team members. See the instructors early if you need help forming a team.
You are also free to identify any topic of interest to you. To choose a topic, identify a user community and problem for which there is a recognized need. Choose a topic that is a reasonable scope for a semester project. Some topic ideas are listed below.
Hand in:
1-page that identifies your team's Name, team members (name, ID, and PID), and a description of the topic including user community and general problem.
The project topics are intended to be somewhat open-ended, giving you significant freedom to design user interfaces and visualizations. Although some topics are based on existing user interfaces and visualization techniques, it is not required (and perhaps not recommended) that your design be similar to the existing tools.
Biologists are attempting to reverse engineer the biological processes of living organisms. The goal is to learn how the genes, encoded in the DNA, react to stimuli and interact with other biomolecules to cause the behavior of an organism. For example, by what process do Pine trees respond to and survive drought conditions? Potentially, this information could be used to cultivate more hearty trees. Biologists pursue answers to these questions by performing controlled scientific experiments on the organisms and genes. They must integrate and make sense of a variety of different types of information to attempt to derive answers.
First, biologists measure the activity level of genes under a variety of environmental conditions (like hard drought, or mild drought), and at several time points over a period of time (t1, t2, ...). In a typical experiment, biologists will measure approximately 1000 different genes under a 2-5 environmental conditions over 1-10 time points. Data is collected in a spreadsheet like this: (Note, gene activity >0 means more active than usual, <0 means less active than usual.)
|
gene activity levels |
||||||
| gene name | hard drought, time 1 | hard drought, time 2 | ... | mild drought, time 1 | mild drought, time 2 | ... |
| gene A | 5.0 | 3.5 | ... | 0.0 | 0.0 | ... |
| gene B | -2.1 | -1.0 | ... | -1.5 | -0.5 | ... |
| ... | ||||||
Second, biologists build networks (nodes and links), called Pathways, that represent how various genes and other biomolecules interact with each other to perform a biological function. These networks can have 10s to 1000s of nodes.
geneA ---activates---> geneB -----inhibits-----> geneC
|-----activates----> geneD -----activates-------^
Biologists need to relate the very large quantity of gene activity measurements to the pathway networks. The goal is to understand how the pathways are involved in the organism's response to the environmental condition (e.g. drought), and perhaps help them build and modify pathways to better represent the measured data. Visualization tools that help them grasp all this data, understand relationships, and derive possible answers is sorely needed.
Sample data available. Potential points-of-contact or "users": Purvi Saraiya
With the waves of malicious attacks by hackers, viruses, and worms, keeping a networked computer system secure is a challenging task. Automated tools can detect obvious known intrusions, but vigilance by the computer user or administrator is the only defense against the rest. System hardening can prevent intrusions (e.g. unplugging the system!), but can also render the system unusable by its users. Enabling useful features for the user (such as file sharing), also opens holes for attack. Hence, users must monitor their system closely to ward off intruders.
Methods for monitoring system events, running processes, open ports, incoming and outgoing packets, communications between processes, user status, etc., are needed to enable more secure systems and greater levels of trust.
How can users or administrators maintain a close watch over the internals of their system or entire sub-network? Can visualization be used to monitor this diverse array of information? How can these tools be designed to enable users to maintain alertness while working on other tasks without overly disrupting their work? How can the tools support in depth analysis of potential intrusions?
A growing problem in personal computing is keeping track of documents, images, email, web favorites, etc. As people store more and more information on their computers, tools such as Windows explorer and the desktop are rapidly becoming unusable. How can we design better alternatives to these tools that will help people save, track, find, remember, and reuse their documents more efficiently? Consider possible targeted user groups or data types, such as personal digital photo collections, email, calendars/schedules, or newsgroups.
Email is getting out of hand. While it is useful to maintain contact with colleagues, friends, relatives for personal or work-related activities, it can also lead to email inundation. Spam is making the process even more tiring. Additional forms of communication, such as phone messaging, snail mail, instant messaging, web forums, and other devices, only add to the confusion. Maintaining multiple asynchronous conversions with many different people over long periods of time can overwhelm a persons memory capacity. How can we design better user interfaces that will help people communicate effectively, manage communication overload, track conversation history, find previous communications, and locate other people?
The following resource provides researchers, students, and practitioners of visualization with convenient access to interesting visualization demonstration software. These demos are useful for communicating new visualization design ideas for many different kinds of data. However, the current static page is difficult to maintain, out of date, and limited in scalability. A better approach is needed that will enable researchers and developers to submit, share, browse, search, and download software demos. This can become a Digital Library for Information Visualization Demos.