Category Archives: Statement

2019: Hidden Workstations Everywhere — Personal Computing for Visualization in the Mature Cloud Era

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Author(s): Aaron Knoll
Affiliation(s): University of Utah

Submission (pdf)

Abstract:

In just five short years, visualization, HPC and data analysis users will need to constantly remind themselves which resource they’re working on as they run dozens of virtualization clients on devices from tablets and laptops to wristwatches and headsets. The desktop will not be truly dead — just lonely — living either in an empty office or in a machine room. But it will be busy. New CPU and manycore architectures, cheap memory, and the demands of scalable ray tracing and database algorithms will bring about a return of mid-scale shared-memory computing. Visualization clusters and cloud resources will increasingly consist of “fat nodes”, operated interactively as opposed to in batch. For the foreseeable future, the occasional need for root access, large displays and a real mouse and keyboard to interact and code will bring researchers back to the office to work on their personal machines, before heading off to the next conference to actually do work on them.

 

2020 -Welcome to the Visual Home: BC Architects, planners and researchers prototype visualization services for informative buildings

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Author(s): Lyn Bartram
Affiliation(s): Simon Fraser University


Abstract:

What happens when data are ubiquitous in our lives, our homes are completely networked, and information pertinent to decisions we make in daily life are virtually at our fingertips? The approach that hallmarked the first decades of the digital home has been to supply residents with an assortment of standalone apps,  websites and social media for retrieving, monitoring and and analysing data from a plethora of sources, and to design specialised views that are particular to devices like tablets and phones.  But this doesn’t work in an increasingly fluid and dynamic information landscape where information-driven decisions  happen throughout the home in the course of daily life. New light technologies let us paint displays onto the surfaces and materials in our homes, embedding visualization capabilities into the very fabric of our living spaces, and extending the affordances of a display to the actual building envelope, appliances and furniture that comprise that home. Visualization has now become both a functional and an aesthetic consideration in how we design and use our living spaces: instead of the quaint, over-automated “Smart home” of the 1990s, we now have “informative homes” capable of receiving, capturing and communicating data right at the points, times and activities when we need it. Instead of getting regular but infrequent reports of our data (an energy bill, a school report card, the financial records of our building council), the informative home subscribes to data feeds and visualization services that can mash-up and slice the data into meaningful forms based on use and constraints specified by the resident. Architects are working with visualization researchers, municipal planners, and social scientists to explore how well-known principles of automated visualization design can transfer to this broader space, extending the notion of a display to include surface properties (e.g. a stainless steel fridge door), contexts of use (e.g. a kitchen backsplash, a social table) and aesthetic and affective constraints (the “persuasive meter”. )

2014: The Movies Have Lied To Us

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Author(s): Danyel Fisher
Affiliation(s): Microsoft Research


Abstract:

The movies, it turns out, are a terrible model for data visualization.

Let me step back a moment. If I want to know what the future of, say, intelligent agents might look, I have a lot of choices. KITT from Knight Rider, or the Star Trek computer, or HAL from 2001, or any of a thousand other films and television shows will all give me examples of how speech recognition and intelligent agents might look. A designer of current systems can push back, or pick points on the spectrum—“I’d think it can be more mechanical, less humanoid.”
What about computer graphics? The Holodeck. R2D2 projecting the Princess Leia. Infinite zooming in Blade Runner. 3D worlds in Jurassic Park and a million other movies.

And so it goes for lots of developing technologies. Flying cars and self-driving cars. Robots and tablet computers. Movies have shown us visions of the future for power plants, and long distance transport, and food preparation–and even for how doors might work. Film directors, screenwriters, and effects teams have done a wonderful job of portraying the a computerized, high-technology future.

Now, since the beginning, we’ve all understood that computers are very good at presenting and storing information- Or, at least, we’ve believed that we understand that. Sadly, we have only the poorest of examples to work from.
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