Plans and Goals

On this page the members of the VRL record and refine their goals for the current semester. This is a living document in which dhl will provide feedback. See the bottom of the page for links to past plans & goals documents.

Current Schedule

Meetings are on Mondays. The authoritative list is in dhl's calendar.

Current Plans and Goals (Spring '13)

Connor

• Take courses.
  • Interdisciplinary SciVis
  • Distributed Databases and Systems
  • Computational Biology
  • Reading & Research: HCI/Viz course reading from last year
  • Independent brush up on probability. Min = follow CSCI45 lectures. Max = do all p-sets and programming.
• Use classes and additional reading to come up with research proposal.
  • By the end of the semester have a rough draft of my proposal finished
• Revisit the areas of interest I wrote down for David's class at the end of the semester. Reevaluate them, adding and subtracting as appropriate. My hope is that this will make me more aware of what research topics I am interested in.
  • Designing interactive visualizations to support big data
  • Building visualization software that solves real problems
  • Making visualizations accessible to everyone
• Read through the VisWeek 2012 proceedings.

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David

• keep grad students moving along
• keep Cave project moving along (Facilities groundbreaking (delivery dates)
  • facilities budget solid and approved
  • permit applied for
  • facilites work done, including floor delivery and installation
  • metal fab parts completed, delivered, assembled
  • create demo group
• excellent cs237
• prep for cool, new(ish?) cs16 for Spring
• December Expeditions in Computing submission
• volume rendering interaction in WristVis
• brain metrics papers out with Ryan
• longer-term funding matched with group

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Jadrian

• Initial thesis proposal, submitted 2009-06-22
• Proposal second revision, prepared 2009-10-15

Today's Date: 12/10

• Meta-objective: Be ready to graduate and move on in May.
  • Objective: Teach CS 931 well without it taking over my other responsibilities.
    • Key Result: Prep & teaching time are monitored throughout the semester and limited to 10 hours per week.
  • Objective: Demonstrate novelty & significance of the "blockhead" method in the dissertation.
    • Key Result: Drafts for graphics- and medical-focused voxelization papers to dhl by 01/14.
    • Key Result: Software generates large, multi-component slicemaps by 01/18.
      • Completed 01/20.
    • Key Result: Software generates voxel maps by 01/22.
    • Key Result: Software generates antialiased voxel maps by 01/31.
    • Key Result: Software generates synthetic MRIs by 02/05.
    • Key Result: Software generates chi-squared images by 02/08.
    • Key Result: Software identifies plausible optimization moves for a two-component test dataset by 02/13.
    • Key Result: Software improves objective function for two-component test dataset by 02/15.
    • Key Result: Software improves objective function for fiber cup phantom by 03/05.
    • Key Result: Software converges for fiber cup phantom by 03/15.
    • Key result: Software improves objective function for real data by 03/18.
    • Key Result: Graphics-focused paper on voxelization submitted by 02/01.
    • Key Result: Medical-focused paper on voxelization submitted by 02/22.
  • Objective: Write and defend a dissertation that covers and synthesizes the work I've done.
    • Key Result: Dissertation chapters outlined by 01/17.
      • Completed 01/16.
    • Key Result: Defense dates proposed to committee by 01/17.
      • Completed 01/16.
    • Key Result: Draft dissertation to committee by 03/20.
    • Key Result: Defense scheduled with Lauren by 03/20.
    • Key Result: Dissertation defended by 04/30.
  • Objective: Graduate.
    • Key Result: Dissertation submitted to the grad school by 04/30.
    • Key Result: Application to Graduate (and other forms) submitted through Banner by 04/30.
  • Objective: Get a job.
    • Key Result: All academic job applications complete by 01/15.
      • Applications complete 01/13.
    • Key Result: Job interviews attended as invited.
    • Key Result: Non-academic job applications in process by 01/22.
  • Objective: Transition smoothly out of Brown.
    • Key Result: Software and documentation archived by 05/17.

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Steve

• Do a good job shadowing Jadrian for CS 0931
  • Observations updated weekly online on this webpage

• Keep IVRG on track
• Crowd-based visualization collaboration
  • By 1/30: Meet with astronomers and others to find large images (like SkySurvey) that people are actively analyzing; have list of actionable research questions (e.g., have data available to test)
  • By 2/6: Have group settle on final work plan for VisWeek pub, or decide to end meetings
  • By April: If no submission, make plan for CHI submission in mid-September

• Evaluating tractography in the crowd
  • By 2/1: Have benchmark data from Jian cleaned up and annotated
  • By 2/4: Send Jian and David a project plan for crowd experiments and a TVCG paper
  • By end of March: VisWeek submission, or if not ready, TVCG by May or plan for CHI in mid-September

• Online, evaluation examples repository/vis
  • By 2/15: Data coded and moved into online MongoDB
  • If above two projects are not on track for March submission, then visual front end implemented by 3/1 and...
  • By 4/1: TVCG submission drafted
  • By 4/15: TVCG submission submitted

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Ryan

• Start thesis proposal
  • Choose committee
  • Choose topic
  • Conduct preliminary work
• Brain Imaging
  • Run South Africa through pipeline
  • Run St Louis 2nd timepoint through pipeline
  • Manually select tracts for evaluation of automated tract pipeline
  • Develop web-based circle vis
  • Send out Edinburgh normal study paper
• Big Data Vis
  • Make reading list
  • Continue work with Jian developing visual interface to SciDB
  • Design DB structure for the brain imaging projects
  • Explore ideas: collaboration, caching, suggestions, level of detail, CAVE applications, user studies

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Hua

• Required coursework: complete two CS courses (or three)
  • Topics in Distributed Databases and System (big data analysis focus!)
  • Computational Photography
  • Human Factors and Interface Design (just sitting-in, perhaps)
• Progress on the research comp
  • Implement the interface with support for user goals
  • Do the user study
  • Submit to CHI as a work-in-progress

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Past Plans and Goals

• Fall '12
• Summer '12
• Spring '12
• Summer-Fall '11
• Spring '11
• Summer-Fall '10
• Spring '10
• Fall '09
• Summer '09
• Spring '09
• Fall '08
• Summer '08