The topic for Fall, 2006 is visualization. Narrowly, visualization is the display in graphical form of information to be interpreted by a human user. In fact, the sub-field called visualization includes the auditory, tactile, and presumably, olfactory or gustatory modalities of the user, contrary to the specificity of "visual", which is a historical accident. Things perceived make a much more powerful impression if they are manipulable by the user, so that devising and evaluating methods for interacting with displayed information is an essential aspect of visualization, and the course is expected to reflect this importance.
Papers this term will come from specific visualization conferences, like InfoVis and IEEE Visualation, from conferences like APGV, SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI that include papers on visualization-relevant techniques, from journals like ACM Transaction on Graphics, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction and ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and from books like Information Visualization (Colin Ware).
This term's topic will be treated at a conceptual level: identifying the foundational problems of visualization, and various solutions that have be proposed for them. Thus, extensive knowledge of the details of gomputer graphics and human-computer interaction will rarely be necessary. On the other hand, these problems arise, and their solutions are evaluated, in an environment that includes both a human and a computer. Thus, the perceptual and cognitive characteristics of humans will be an important theme throughout the course. Most of the knowledge required is intuitive, so that coursework in psychology or human factors is far less important than everyday observation of and curiosity about human behaviour in the real world. Without this the course is likely to be both uninteresting and unrewarding.
DC3313, 11.30, Wednesday, 13 September, 2006.
DC3313, 14.30, Tuesdays