Thursday, August 15, 2013


Ideas Seminar – Eric Sauda
Date: August 15, 2013

Professor Eric Sauda started off by providing a brief introduction and a precise description about his research area. Initially, he talked about issues related to urban visualization from the perspectives of urban design and computer visualization. He stresses on the interactive visualization which is a new form of communication, providing presentations that allow viewers to interact with information in order to construct their own understandings of it. I think most of people are not expert in research area. We should try to communicate and make them understand. To do so, this project enables the development of new computation technologies to view data and to use interaction abilities and better communicate the results.

The project presents urban visualization in Charlotte. Actually, there’s a lot of system to display large collection of data for urban study. However, most of systems are focused on statistical chart, manual calculations to understand relationships in urban environment. Furthermore, these systems often limit the user’s perspectives on the data, limiting the user’s spatial understanding and cognition of the viewing region. But he suggests 3D view of the urban model, a separate but integrated information visualization view displays multiple disparate dimensions of the urban data, allowing the user to understand the urban environment both spatially and cognitively in one glance. Urban visualization system contains features that interact with urban data, and enhances their ability to better understand the urban model.

I thought the lecture was extremely interesting, not like the traditional talks that are full of jargon but talk more about improving the interactive visualization. As many researchers have pointed out, computing today is moving away in a number of ways. In this sense, I can understand how helpful this interactive urban visualization tool will be in developing and providing intuitive understanding of the urban data and learning algorithms. For the future work, he tries to enable a user to gain a sense of urban legibility that will include both the geometric form as well as the flow of information and goods. I guess, for doing this we need to continue to be a great deal of borrowing of techniques and ideas from artificial intelligence and other areas of computer science.

 

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