Innovation from Cross-Disciplinary Research
From personal experience, I knew that innovative ideas within my discipline often come from research in quite dissimilar discipline. Michelle Borkin of Harvard University hit that nail squarely, driving it through the 2×4 with this TED talk. She relates medical imaging from MRI scans to astronomy data of distant nebulae. And, then she proceeds from there. Her parting comments is “You really never know where your next great idea is going to come from.” Note the many ways that 3D data is gradually emerging from research in many...
read moreFinding Associations in Large Data Sets
While browsing through the latest Scientific American blogs, I found an interesting item on “How to Find Meaning in a Maelstrom of Data”. Well, the article did not live up to the title, but it came close! The blog highlighted the team from MIT and Harvard who authored a research article in Science. An informative video (4:34) is a must-see! Note the short discussion on patterns detected around 2:00. Try analyzing those patterns with the typical statistical method! The problem is scanning large amounts of data to find significant...
read moreThoughts about Initial Scenes in IM-TEL worlds
This morning I was thinking about how to illustrate a virtual world used for Immersive Intelligence. It was a familiar topic that usually gets lost in a blizzard of details. However, it occurred to me that the first design choice is to define the nature of the virtual space. This definition then determines the dimensions used in the initial scene. In other words, the space is like the canvas upon which the data (info-objects) will be painted (rendered). Hence, we will refer to this initial scene as the “canvas”. Here is a list of possible...
read moreInteractive Dynamic Systems
We have concentrate on data visualization too much! That is, visualizing data that has been collected, processed and stored into some database. But, what about data that is generated from equations? How can we visualize this type of data and especially the behavior emerging from the equations? Check out this video by Bret Victor. Simple and thoughtful! Note how the multi-touch user interface (of the iPad) enhances the interaction with a complex set of differential equations.I like the intuitive way that he manipulates the equations to learn...
read moreBoulder Virtual Worlds & Gaming Folks – Tidbits from November 29, 2011
An informal group has convened at the local lunch place about once per month. Great discussion… Lots happening… Here is a quick summary of discussion topics. The Jibe discussions on Google Groups has some great links. Check out these examples of virtual worlds created by students to invoke specific emotions. The multi-user worlds were done using Jibe from the Reaction Grid on top of Unity3D, while the single-user examples were plain Unity3D. Check out Autodesk 123D. Totally unexpected offering from Autodesk — well designed and free!...
read moreBoulder Virtual Worlds & Gaming Folks – Tidbits from November 4, 2011
An informal group has convened at the local lunch place about once per month. Great discussion… Lots happening… Here is a quick summary of discussion topics. 1) Anders is using Avaya web.alive (http://www.avaya.com/usa/product/avaya-web-alive) for some of his weekly Train For Success and for private meetings. 2) Anders has a great line-up for the weekly Train For Success talks at 10:00am on Thursday. See http://www.facebook.com/TrainForSuccess for details 3) The serious game Fold-It (http://fold.it/) is making waves! We are going...
read moreGlobal Picture of Money
Earlier this week, I wrote a blog on GigaPan, a Carnegie Mellon project that artfully displayed time-elapse high-resolution images so that you could surface the embedded stories. Today, I read a blog by Nathan Yau of Flowing Data about a static high-resolution infographic about our global economy. Randall Munroe of xkcd meticulously created comparison charts of money nested in units of trillions, billions, and millions. Fascinating! Zoom and pan! Enjoy! What insights did you discover? Note the contrast of GigaPan with Munroe’s giga-money...
read moreVisualizing with GigaPan
Traditional barriers for rich information visualization are crumbling weekly. The latest was noted in a short article on the Scientific American website about “Seeing the Big (and Small) Picture“. The article highlighted the research group called GigaPan Time Machine at Carnegie Mellon, leaded by Illah Nourbakhsh and Randy Sargent. Go to About and watch the second video (7:04) for a quick intro. A recent conference paper describes the approach of GigaPan. Here is a quote from their website: Each Time Machine captures a...
read moreSQL versus Hadoop versus SciDB
At the recent Teradata Partners Conference, there was much talk about MapReduce and Hadoop, along with the SQL-MapReduce of the acquired Aster Data company. The O’Reilly Strata Conference, which occurred the previous week, popped up several times. So, I scanned the Strata conference schedule and some slide presentations that were posted. One of the Strata talks that caught my attention was Big Data and Big Analytics: SciDB is not Hadoop by Paul Brown, Chief Architect for Paradigm4 and SciDB. Brown’s slides are here. What is SciDB?...
read moreWSJ Notes Gamification of the Workplace
In today’s Wall Street Journal (October 10, 2011 on page B11), an article Latest Game Theory Mixes Work and Play by Rachel Emma Silverman surveys the ways that game theory/design is changing everyday business tasks, making them more engaging. By using reward of points and badges, friendly competition is encouraged. Gartner estimates that 70% of large corporations will use workplace gamification by 2014, while M2 Research predicts revenues of $938 million for gamification software and services by 2014. Gamification vendors, such as...
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