FXPAL Blog

If you’re in the business of conveying information to people, you might be interested in engaging their interest to cause them to seek out more information and to deepen their understanding of the data. That’s the premise that Nick Diakopoulos is trying to explore with some interactive visualizations of demographic data.

Nick (a former FXPAL Intern) is exploring the design space of interactive, semi-automated visualizations that can be put together quickly and yet leverage the kinds of interaction design characteristic of computer games.

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I recently found an interesting collection of student literature review/position papers from Umeå University related to a range of CS and HCI issues, including mobile technology, ubiquitous computing, table-top displays, etc. Among them was a paper by Alan Larsson that examined the role that slate-like tablet computers can play in education. It examined requirements for such devices both from the instructor’s and from the students’ perspective, analyzed them on several dimensions, and then compared three devices — an iPad, a (perhaps soon to be released) Android tablet, and an older-generation tablet computer — for their fit to the various tasks.

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Yesterday I attended an evening presentation session of student projects created in several courses related to HCI at UC Berkeley. The show was organized by Bjoern Hartmann and Maneesh Agrawala, and featured presentations by teams from four courses from three different disciplines: CS, SIMS, and  Art/Anthropology. Each presentation took 2.5 minutes, and there were over 30 presentations total. Most of the work was around the design of mobile applications, and some creative constraints (e.g., don’t design for students; focus on specific populations) stipulated at the beginning of the projects ensured a great diversity of designs.

I cannot possibly do justice to the effort and to the results here, but fortunately all presentations and many associated videos are available online. Some presentations stood out, however, and deserve special mention.

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This is the third of a series of posts advertising internship positions at FXPAL for the summer of 2010.  A listing of all blog posts about our 2010 internship positions is available here.

Significant privacy issues arise when personal data is stored and analyzed. This issue is exacerbated when part or all of the storage and analysis is outsourced to a third party. To support such analysis in an awareness system, while addressing the privacy concerns, we are building into our system a facility that supports computation of simple statistics on encrypted data. This facility can be extended in a number of ways to support a greater variety of computations. There are a wealth of research questions related to designing such a system to support the types of computations useful to our application while choosing the best tradeoffs in terms of storage, bandwidth, division of labor between the third party and the clients, computation time at encryption, time to compute the statistics, and time to decrypt.

Prospective candidates should be enrolled in a PhD program and have significant experience in privacy and security, particularly computation on or search of encrypted data.

The intern will be hosted by Eleanor Rieffel.  For more information on the FXPAL internship program, please visit our web site.

The next talk in the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures series is this Friday. Robert Bryant, the current director of MSRI, will speak on “Rolling and Tumbling—The idea of Holonomy.” It sounds like a fun talk; he’ll illustrate his talk with “everyday and some not-so-everyday toys.”

I’ve posted the slides from my Bay Area Mathematical Adventures talk last month on From Photographs to Models: The Mathematics of Image-Based Modeling. I blogged about that experience here. I had hoped to post a link to the video at the same time, but it isn’t ready yet. I never feel that a talk is fully captured from just the slides, especially one that was designed to be interactive. I will post a link to the video once it is up.

I’d be tempted to go to Bryant’s talk except that I’m singing that night. Two FXPAL folks, Bill van Melle and I, sing in the 40 voice Bay Choral Guild. We have concerts Fri, Sat, and Sun at various Bay Area locations. Come if you are in the area and would enjoy a concert of festive Baroque choral works performed by our excellent group together with an outstanding group of soloists and musicians!

A couple of weeks ago I attended the SIAM/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling and heard a lovely talk by Richard Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld and his wife Elaine Cohen were this year’s Bézier award winners for their work in computer aided geometric design (CAGD). He spoke about his correspondence with Bézier and showed us many of the letters they sent back and forth in the early days of CAD/CAM, with their many hand drawn diagrams and the typed text with the math symbols added in by hand. I spent the time marveling at how they managed to have an effective collaboration over such an impoverished communication channel. But even with all of the wonderful 3D rendering capabilities we have today, it is still hard to communicate about 3D objects and spaces over a distance. Having a visual rendering is not sufficient. Spatial reasoning requires more. Riesenfeld mentioned Bézier’s view that “touch is more discriminative than eyes.”

This theme reminded me that I’ve been meaning to describe and send to the math factory folks  a suggestion for an exhibit in the math museum. Instead, I’ll first write about it here.

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In early August I thumbed through a copy of The New Yorker idly wondering which article I’d like to read when the name “Glen Whitney” popped out. A close friend of mine from graduate school is named Glen Whitney. Could it be the same person? Sure enough, with the article called Math-hattan, it had to be! The article talks about his efforts to create a math museum and describes the math tours he is currently giving of Manhattan.

The museum itself is still in the planning stages, but the exhibit Math Midway gathered a lot of press during its tour this summer. I love the picture of Glen riding the square wheeled tricycle that’s part of the exhibit. (Before looking at the pictures, how did they succeed in making the ride smooth?) Like the  Bay Area Mathematical Adventures series, this exhibit is great outreach. I hope eventually it will come west.

In graduate school, I found Glen’s enthusiasm for many things, particularly for mathematics, inspiring and infectious. It is great to see him so successfully pursuing this dream.

On Wednesday, I spoke about “From Photographs to Models: the Geometry of Image-Based 3D Reconstruction” as part of the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures (BAMA) series. I felt immensely honored to be asked to speak given the caliber of past speakers. Last night I felt even more honored when I discovered the high caliber of the students I was speaking to.

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