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 (Fall '15)

Connor

Boldfaced goals are those that mark the high-level success of each project.

Dissertation

• By 2 October: send dhl updated proposal draft
• By 1 November: schedule proposal date

Fellowships

• Submit applications for Adobe, Facebook, and any other eligible fellowships
• update website
• convert c.v. to XeTeX

Genomics

• Weekly: check up on MAGI interaction log scraping
• By 31 October: (re)submit latest draft to TVCG
• By 25 November: demo BLADE prototype with implemented mining techniques
• By 20 December: Code-freeze BLADE devlopment to prepare for evaluation

Color

• By 1 November: (re)submit paper to TVCG
• Help Karen prep heatmap color paper for submission

Other

• Complete Sheridan Certificate I program
• Give a great color lecture for Remco's infovis class

Hua

• Cog grant proposal
  • By Sep. 11: take one pass through the proposal to resolve any inconsistency in contents
• BraiNet implementation
  • By Oct. 30: implement basic corpus analysis functionalities
    • (By Sep. 18) Context-based retrieval: given a block of texts, use techniques such as latent semantic analysis or topic modeling to extract relevant key terms
    • (By Sep. 25) Three way linking between primary texts (e.g. a word document, a piece of plain text, a bibtex file), concepts and evidence
    • (By Oct. 9) Support search within a small set of publications provided by the user (e.g. a bibtex file)
    • (By Oct.12) Have executable sketches of ThoughtFlow's interface design
    • (By Oct. 23) Meet with Badre for feedback
    • (By Oct. 30) Case papers: lets the user specify case papers in addition to supplying texts or terms; the tool will then use the case papers as constraints and return a set of papers where the set 1) is a subset of all papers associated with the given texts or terms; 2) contains the case papers; 3) is as small as possible.
  • By Nov. 27: implement literature corpus visualizations
    • (By Nov. 13) theme river visualization that shows how a set of concepts contained in a body of texts (e.g. a grant proposal; a notebook kept by the researcher) evolves over time - what concepts have been added / removed? how much evidence has been added for each concept?
    • (By Nov. 27) refined user interface for exploring the set of concepts and evidence (network visualization?)
• Two VIS talks
  • By Oct. 2: give practice talks to the speech and writing coach
  • By Oct. 9: give practice talks to scivis / dhlgroup
  • By Oct. 30: deliver the talks at VIS!
• Event sequence visualization paper
  • By Sep. 11: first draft of the blog post sent
  • By Sep. 23: second revision of the blog post ready
• BraiNet user study
  • By Dec 4: run a pilot study with two participants
  • By Dec 11: study design refined based on pilot study

Steve

• Dissertation
  • By June 30: committee settled ✓
  • By June 30: dissertation draft completed and circulated ✓
    • Address feedback for dissertation as it comes in
  • By June 30: get scheduling feedback for committee for mid-August defense ✓
  • By early July: resolve defense scheduling ✓
  • By mid July: submit defense, date, meta-data, and thesis draft to Lauren ✓
  • By mid August: defend thesis, get notes for dissertation revisions from committee
  • By mid September: do any necessary dissertation revisions, get signatures from committee, and submit

• TVCG/VAST paper
  • By June 20: Use R to get CI intervals for correlations ✓
  • By June 26: Help Hua with response, submission for conditional acceptance ✓

• NSF Proposal on Cognitive/Task Modeling
  • Meet weekly to stay on track for September deadline
  • By June 25:
    • Gather notes from all past proposals ✓
    • Write up independent thoughts about new proposal, then compare with David's Expedition notes
  • By mid July: rough draft of new proposal based on notes, discussions
  • By August: help prepare solid final draft
  • Submit in FastLane
    • By September 16 for MEDIUM
    • By September 24 for LARGE
    • By November 18 for SMALL

• Other
  • Review workshops for VIS as possible project venues
  • Find housing in Boston ✓

Ryan

• RP Imaging Studies
  • Send update for request for additional bundles in SMART data
  • Iron out details for South Africa analysis (group meeting on 6/10)
    • Update: fiber bundle length (need a couple more bundles)
    • Update: graph-based analysis w/ Laurie
  • Keep up with paper reviewing and other requests
• Diffusion outside brain
  • Update: support image analysis w/ Trey Crisco & Ed Walsh
• Yurt
  • Demo as needed
  • Provide support for CS137-related things
  • Help Johannes with getting up to speed for TAing
  • Update: Get some brain data in
• Thesis work
  • Complete a rough draft of dissertation
  • Work with Dan to get bipolar imaging paper out
  • Update: Put together documentation of various analyses and tools

David

• yurt
  • working well enough for cs137
  • working well enough for VT experiment
  • press
  • paper out about R&D, model on Cruz
  • hw and low-level software testing/reliability plan
  • application software development easier (asf?)
• VT
  • first experiment complete, written, and out!
• orthopedics
  • tools continuing to run well (despite upgrade)
  • renewal with Trey
  • diffusion imaging
• longer-term funding progress
  • cognition
  • VR
  • brains
  • trey
  • STC?
• good CS137
• keep all advisees moving along appropriately

Wesley

• CAVE/YURT
  • Complete or nearly complete user study with Johannes
  • Help out with Demos when needed
  • Add new applications for use in YURT

• Fitts' Law
  • Work on paper with HCI seminar group

• Third Person Perspective
  • Make plans for future of 3PP project or something derivative

• Hospital
  • Discuss potential projects with Derek

Johannes

• Cave/Yurt
  • Complete user study with Wesley
  • Design next experiment for VT project
  • Work on VR volume visualization (3D Visualizer/CaveVOX/...)
  • Get more concrete collaboration with students of Robbert Creton or Kristi Wharton
  • Help out with Demos when needed
  • Explore use of VTK in VRG3D

• CS137
  • Set up clean development branch for CavePainting
  • Get acquainted with the sourcecode
  • Fix some bugs if possible

• Fitts' Law
  • Work on paper with HCI seminar group

• Thesis Project
  • Restart discussions with Derek and Kristi
  • Explore collaborations for genome folding visualizations
  • by December: Create Thesis proposal draft

Josh

• General
  • Become acquainted with the department and Providence in general.
  • Develop a vision for research and start finding projects to work on.
  • Improve artistic skill in order to be able to communicate ideas more effectively.

• Yurt/Cave
  • Start to learn how to work in the Yurt effectively (likely through taking CS 137)
  • Find a project to work on in the Yurt.

Wallace

• Finish experiment and write IEEEVR paper

• Finish VR volume renderer
  • last changes: added another kernel for gpu pre processing, copying one PBO to another in the GPU. Simple kernel (just remove part of the dataset)
  • Issues: Interaction pass takes a long time on CPU
  • Options: add spatial structure, perform interaction on GPU
  • Other improvements: 1) reduce original RGBA 3d texture to mono -> improve memory usage 2) remove 3d texture altogether and implement filtering in the shader -> possible faster copy in one pass, 3) change to splatting 4) refactor code

• Reimplement Volume Cracker like interaction
  • Implement on VR
  • Develop hardware

• Finish new interaction technique
  • Finish design
  • Implement software
  • Implement technique on VR

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Past Plans and Goals

• Summer '15
• Spring '15
• Fall '14
• Spring-Summer '14
• Summer-Fall '13
• Spring '13
• 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