Student Thoughts Recap

IND E 599 students turned in one-page summaries each week throughout the academic quarter. This page documents their responses in terms of the more interesting or poignant points, in list format:

• User interface assessment strategies for visual analytics visualization support are likely appropriate for assessing video game interfaces as well.
• Augmented reality seems appropriate for bringing video games to the dining room table and getting more family involvement.
• Optimization work seems ripe for problematic results based on bad assumptions in the models. Profiling work done for the likely terrorist in the Oklahoma City bombings represents an example of a model with bad assumptions.
• Situation awareness techniques seem applicable to the Internet as a whole in order to get a grip on what trends are emerging and how public perception is changing.
• Paradigms in science are like mind sets in intelligence analysis - similar benefits and similar pitfalls.
• The harder parts of a science of visual analytics seems to be in getting a better understanding of confidence, meaning, representation, flow, and abstraction.
• Human studies in orientation effects on perception align with ramifications suggested by James J Gibson's ecological perspective on perception and interface design.
• There are two new journals for Homeland Security: Journal of Homeland Security and Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management
• Seems there is a need for more dynamic lighting research in the augmented reality arena.
• Visual analytics seem to be affected more by data format variety, data temporal differences, and disparate data themes than you'd expect at first glance.
• Frog's eye-brain study showed great insight into cognition in retrospect - another good lesson on how entrenched science can get in accepting alternative hypotheses in the face of a good theory.
• The class certainly demonstrates how critical visual analytics would be to national security.
• The GOSIR project seems ideal as emergency response support via the optimization algorithms that can crunch mental heuristics on a timely basis.
• Situation awareness requires more input on weather and natural conditions than expected at first consideration.
• Would be nice for augmented reality to have pattern recognition for human sign language in order to drive data sets. Preprocessing for pattern recognition is obviously the hardest part of AR.
• Useful to spend time thinking about how getting more data is overrated compared to improving our mental processes with the data we have.
• University of Washington study within Technical Communications department showed that increased site usability actually decreased comprehension for some sites.
• We should mine the GIS 3-D visualization techniques for applicability to analysis visualization products.
• Lots of useful ideas about how our experience effects visual interpretations - for example, lighting assuming light source is in the sky of the image (above) instead of below it.
• Cultural reactions to color need to be studied better worldwide for Web-based data presentations.
• Use inspired research is an extremely useful approach to visualization studies.
• Personal cognition studies are hard. How can we better tell how different we perceive from others as individuals?
• I like the three rules of visualization projects:
  1. Make sure the visualization fills a need
  2. Make sure the technological investment reduces cognitive load
  3. Make sure the medium is accessible to many
• Stochastic statistics provide many opportunities to add realism to data investigation.
• One of the best uses of statistics is to standardize assessment techniques across data sets.
• The class did not linger long enough on computational linguistics nor consider their application in conjunction with other techniques.