[4eyes] Student presentations tomorrow: Rama, Mock

[Tobias Hollerer]

Title: *_Imagination in Media Arts: The Role of Technology in Creative 
Freedom_*

Rama C. Hoetzlein

Date: Monday, June 1st
Time: 11:00-12:00 am
Location: Experimental Visualization Lab, Elings Hall 2611 (CNSI)

Committee: Tobias Hollerer (Chair, Comp Sci/MAT), George Legrady (MAT), 
Laurie Monahan (Art History)

This dissertation proposal explores the role of technology in creative 
freedom through two fundamental questions: 1) How does technology both 
enable and hinder creativity? 2) How do we design tools that overcome 
creative constraints? These questions will be examined via a doctoral 
research plan which considers existing art works in traditional media, 
painting, sculpture and their digital counterparts in modeling and 
programming, and maps the inherent constraints of these tools. The goal 
is to understand how each tool enhances or limits creative expression, 
and to introducing new tools which specifically overcome some of these 
constraints. Novel tools are proposed which focus on behavior formalism 
and the use of form, surface and materiality in real-time computer 
graphics.

Everyone Welcome.

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Major Area Exam
Panuakdet Suwannatat
Monday, June 1, 2009
3:00 – *ESB 2001*

Committee: Tobias Hollerer (chair), Kevin Almeroth, Xifeng Yan

Title: Intelligent User Interface for Visual Data Mining

With today's storage and networking technology, abundance of data 
collected from everywhere becomes both a challenge and an opportunity in 
knowledge discovery. Retail stores collect data about customers to 
improve sales. Network administrators monitor and collect traffic data 
to diagnose connection problems and detect intruders. To find the causes 
and cures of diseases, physicians and medical researchers collect 
massive amounts of biomedical images for further analysis. Several data 
mining techniques have emerged over the past decade to address many of 
the challenges. Still, users find themselves overwhelmed by many aspects 
of searching and mining: from the data itself to the different choices 
of techniques and their many parameters; even the distilled results 
themselves can be difficult to comprehend.

Proper information visualization is necessary for the users to: a) gain 
an understanding of the data; b) evaluate the quality of data mining 
results; and c) create a plan of action to improve the quality of the 
results and their understanding. Focus-and-context techniques allow 
users to closely examine certain areas while not losing awareness of the 
big picture. Different data management techniques help enable the 
visualization system to be interactive even for massive amounts of data. 
Visual Data Mining combines the strengths of data mining techniques and 
the benefits of information visualization. Understanding, evaluation, 
and actions on the data should be done in an integrated and interactive 
system, facilitated by an intelligent user interface.

In this talk, we will examine how different intelligent user interfaces 
have been used to gain understanding of data. Different visualization 
approaches related to an investigative analysis of data will be 
discussed. We will also discuss current work on network visualization 
and approaches to visualization of uncertain data.

Everyone Welcome.



-- 
Tobias Hollerer
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5110

holl at cs.ucsb.edu, Office: (805)893-8759, Fax: (805)893-8553