2 3 RedefiningRedefining the the realms realms SpringWInter 2011 2012 Computer Scienceof possibilityof possibility Partnering with Boeing Evangelos Milios and Axel Soto work with their team using visual analytics to improve aircraft manufacturing safety Risk Taking An Alumna Success Digitizing Headaches Faculty of Computer Science cs.dal.ca 2 Computer Science We live in a global economy and Canadian universities are not immune from this Visual Analytics Researchin Computer Science phenomenon. In response, Dalhou- sie has placed a new emphasis on A major project is underway collaboration with international insti- in the Faculty of Computer tutions. So, where does the Faculty of Science in Visual Analytics, Computer Science fit in all of this? funded by the Boeing In the past year, the Faculty of Company. The project, Computer Science has signed a 2+2 started in October 2010, is MOU with one Chinese university and led by principal investigator has three more such agreements in Evangelos Milios and con- the final stages of negotiations. A sists of two parts, Visual 2+2 means that the students take Text Analytics (over 5 years) their first two years at their home and Mobile Graphics (over university and come to us for their 3 years). final two years, receiving their BCSc or BINF from Dalhousie. Visual Text Analytics We have just signed an MOU Visual text analytics aims with King Saud University (KSU) in to advance the state of Riyadh for their graduates to come the art in sense-making of to us for Masters, PhD and Post- large document corpora. Doctoral studies. The search paradigm for Dalhousie is also part of the CAL- finding information of DO consortium (Dalhousie, Alberta, interest in text collections Laval, and Ottawa), signing agree- is well established, and ments with the governments of Brazil exemplified by the success Example of visual analytics: GeoTime provides an integrated and Chile to bring graduate students of Web search engines. The view for analysis of a combination of temporal and geospatial to CALDO member universities. next frontier is the support data. (From “Illuminating the path” by Thomas & Cook) Dalhousie is working to provide of sense-making out of an infrastructure to support these medium to large scale text analytics to the mining of aviation students, with new ESL and learning text corpora by the domain expert and safety related corpora aiming to improve skills programs, as well as summer analyst, who is trying to untap the tacit all aspects of safety in aircraft manu- institutes so students can immerse knowledge hidden in the text. facturing, operation and maintenance. themselves in Dal, Nova Scotian and Visual text analytics brings together This is the main driver of the proposed Canadian cultures. text mining, text visualization and hu- project. Additional domains that will These are not one-way agreements. man computer interaction to create be addressed, to broaden the scope of All allow for our students to spend computer tools to support this activity. the research, and the generality of the time away at the partner universities Key challenges include: support for real- proposed methodologies, include: help and for collaboration between our time visualization and interaction, novel desk application (trouble ticket mining); researchers. It is important that our text visualization techniques (possibly community question-answering forum students take advantage of these op- domain dependent) and interaction tech- mining; research literature and patent portunities to travel and study abroad niques that permit the domain analyst mining; financial report and time series because, as I said at the beginning, to fine tune the text mining, without mining. The project will train a new we live in a global economy. becoming a text mining expert themself. generation of students, who will bridge the areas of text mining, text visualiza- Michael Shepherd The Boeing and Aeroinfo tion and human computer interaction, to Dean Systems Projects support current and future needs of this Boeing and one of its Canadian affili- growing Canadian industry sector. ates, Aeroinfo Systems, have a major The project involves several faculty interest in the application of visual members, including Vlado Keselj, Mike Computer Science 3 Visual Analytics Researchin Computer Science Shepherd, Stephen Brooks, Kirstie Hawkey tion, of course, leads to unwieldy paper Bonnie MacKay. Several graduate and Raza Abidi, and two postdoctoral printouts and/or multiple interruptions to students working on the project started researchers, Axel Soto and Aminul Islam. work flow. The ruggedized laptops are too their degrees in September 2011, includ- A strong team of graduate students, cumbersome in many situations, such as ing PhD student Raghav Sampangi, both at the PhD level (Magda Jankowska, on a ladder or in a confined space. The and Master’s students Xiaoyu Yu, Ankur Armin Sajadi, Raheleh Makki Niri) and introduction of newer smaller mobile de- Sharma and Matt MacDonald. Two under- at the Master’s level (Shali Liu, Tomasz vices, while appealing, has constraints graduate students worked on setting up Niewiarowski) started their degrees on screen size, interaction techniques, the lab facilities for the Mobile Graphics in September 2011, and are already and complexity of mental model. project in the summer of 2011. The lab is producing some interesting work through The project investigates differ- equipped with large screen displays and projects in their directed study on Visual ent aspects of the overall problem of an assortment of mobile devices. Text Analytics this fall. Undergraduate supporting aircraft mechanics during If all goes as expected with matching student Ryan Kiros worked on the project information retrieval tasks in complex funds from Federal Government through under an NSERC USRA in the summer information spaces that include text, 2D jointly funded NSERC collaborative of 2011. The project has acquired six and 3D images. As the mechanics also research and development projects, MI- desktop computers running Linux, tied must orient themselves in physical space TACS internships and NSERC Industrial together into a Hadoop cluster by PhD and integrate the digital realm with Postgraduate scholarships, the faculty student Marek Lipczak. The project has real-world parts, augmented reality (AR), hopes to double the number of students access to the Compute Canada AceNet including 3D vision and an RFID system, in the coming year, establishing high-performance computing facility, may aid them in their tasks. The project Dalhousie Computer Science as a hub of and a powerful computing cluster in the involves faculty members Kirstie Hawkey, Visual Analytics in Eastern Canada. Faculty of Computer Science. Derek Reilly, Qigang Gao, Carolyn Watters, Stephen Brooks, Dirk Arnold and Srini Mobile Graphics Sampalli, and postdoctoral researcher The Mobile Graphics part of the project aims to support airplane mechanics, who work in a very complex physical and digital world whether they are in the factory assembling planes or conduct- ing maintenance work at airports. Their digital workspace is accessed through multiple devices, including printouts. At the start of each shift on the factory floor, mechanics view the instructions and drawings of the aircraft that they will be working on during that shift. There is a stationary workstation on the shop floor where they can print paper engineering drawings and specs in order to take both the appropriate tools and proper protocols to the aircraft. Once at the aircraft, they have two options to access the information on site: using a stationary display terminal and printer at the assembly station outside the aircraft or sign out a laptop computer for use Part of the student and faculty team working hard on the Boeing project on the aircraft. The stationary worksta- 4 Computer Science Dr John A. Stasko and inset Dr. Daniel Keim Dr. Daniel Keim is head of the Information Visualization and Data Analysis Research Group at the University of Konstanz in Germany and has been actively involved in informa- tion visualization and data analysis research for about 20 years. Dr Keim developed a number of novel visual analysis techniques for very large data sets with applications to a wide range of application areas including financial analysis, network analysis, geo-spatial analysis, as well as text and multimedia analysis. His research resulted in two recent books “Solving problems with Waving, not drowning Visual Analytics” and “Interactive Data Visualization” both of which he co- Guest lecturers paint a fascinating picture authored. Dr. Keim spoke to an audience at the Scotiabank Auditorium at the end We are in danger of drowning in data. ognizing patterns or making exploratory of October on the title of “Visual Problem How rapidly we have moved from judgements in trying to find out where Solving: How humans and computers kilobytes to megabytes, gigabytes, tera, the patterns might lie in a complex data cooperate best”. peta and on up to zetta and yotta. All set. Visual Analytics is an emerging Dr. John A. Stasko delivered the this data, generated research discipline second Killam Lecture in November. He by health systems, Although computers are very which tries to is a Professor and Associate Chair of communication tools, develop technologies good at performing well defined the School of Interactive Computing at media, security, net- which appropri- the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. working, commercial searches, queries and automated ately combine the Stasko directs the Information Interfaces activity and general strengths of intel- data analysis, they are not as Research Group and is an internation- record keeping, is too ligent automatic ally recognized researcher in the area much for human be- good as humans at recognizing data analysis with of human-computer interaction, with a ings to read through the visual percep- patterns or making exploratory specific focus on information visualiza- and analyze. tion and analysis tion and visual analytics. His research One of our most judgements… capabilities of the group develops ways to help people and important chal- human user.