MaryAnn's Blog

Hello all. The past two weeks since returning from spring break, I have been working with the grad student to write the vis paper. It is due next week on Friday. A couple of the undergraduates (along with my CREU peer, Diana) have stayed on to make changes to the RanKit application to make it better for publication. Briefly, I'll share a couple things I wrote in the past two weeks that have gone into the paper. First, I'll share some equations that describe the amount of information collected from the different build tools for each unit of user effort. Second, I'll give three use cases that describe why these tools might be used. Equations The ranking algorithm is based on pairwise comparisons. We will assume that the user's input is meaningful and that there exist no cycles in their rank (e.g. user says Toy Story 1 > Toy Story 2, Toy Story 2 > Toy Story 3, and Toy Story 3 > Toy Story 1). The collection of all possible rankings is a directed acyclic gra...

I am away from school this week on Spring Break, I will continue with progress next week.

Last week, I wrote about our new plan to write a visualization paper based on the IQP team's ranking application. At conferences like VAST, there are several different types of papers one can submit, and our first challenge was deciding where to pigeonhole our application. After talking with Professor Harrison, a notable vis expert in our CS department, we determined that the novelty in our project is the user interface. As such, our paper would fall into the category of systems or design study. According to Processes and Pitfalls in Writing Information Visualization Research Papers , a sort-of guidebook to the world of writing vis, systems papers focus on architecture choices and the design of abstractions. Design study papers, in contrast, demonstrate a new visual design to solve a problem, often using existing algorithms or techniques. If we consider ours to be a systems paper, we would probably focus on explaining the pipeline (from choosing a dataset to building a ranking from...