Visualizing large and complex hierarchies poses two core difficulties: preserving a planar, collision-free geometry at scale, and allowing user-specified adjustments of important quality measures that are of interest to the user. As no algorithm has been found to be optimal for every quality measure, it is important to develop algorithms that are efficient for specific quality measures. To solve these problems, we present an algorithm for producing planar, straight-line grid drawings of general trees that enables positioning leaves in the tree closer to the root, as selected by the user, without disturbing the rest of the hierarchical structure. The quality measure of having leaves closer to the root provides an opportunity to visualize the overview of the tree and, at the same time, to allow closer inspection of the relationship between the furthest ancestor (the root of the tree) and the descendants (the leaves of the tree). Our approach works by creating horizontal and vertical channels at successive levels of the tree to avoid node overlaps, using hashing-based lookups for rapid insertion and lookups of thousands of nodes, and applying angle constraints for non-intersecting repositioning. We show that this method, when applied to both synthetic and real-world hierarchical data sets, results in a scalable yet interactive solution for geometric clarity combined with user-defined leaf mobility.

Edge crossings in graph visualization pose an important challenge leading to low readability and interpretability. Yet, classical methods like edge bundling, transparency, and edge coloring allow partial resolution of these problems at the cost of new limitations: they cannot blend colors and still have limitations for distinguishing overlapping edges. On the other hand, Gestalt techniques have been tried as a way to distinguish edges, with relative effectiveness. We implement a texture-based Modulo-Aligned Weaving Technique that alleviates overlapping graph edges with alternating color patterns interwoven with perceptually optimal colors. It builds on weaving principles to improve edge separation in densely connected graphs while preserving spatial coherence and color fidelity in the visualization. Based on the Gestalt theory of texture and readability metrics, our method gradually removes visual complexity and cognitive load so that users can trace relationships in data more comfortably. Our results indicate that the Modulo-Aligned Weaving technique offers a practical and scalable edge-partitioning strategy to improve graph visualizations, laying the foundation for future progress on texture-based techniques to manage edge crossings.

This innovative practice full paper describes an innovative pedagogical framework that integrates community engaged learning and social justice principles into a traditional web development course, fostering a holistic approach to education that goes beyond programming languages and algorithms, and aiming to redefine the educational landscape by encouraging socially responsible and community-driven web development practices. The community engaged learning component of the course is structured around partnerships with local non-profit organizations, community groups, or socially impactful initiatives. Through these partnerships, students engaged in real-world projects, applying their technical expertise to develop impactful solutions that contribute to social justice causes. The web development course framework is presented and sample projects are provided with student and community partner reflections and benefits. We explored the effect of the community engaged learning and social justice initiatives on technical proficiency, critical thinking, teamwork, and ethical reasoning. Results indicate a positive correlation between community engaged learning experiences and increased student motivation, teamwork, and a heightened awareness of the societal implications of their work. Furthermore, the paper discusses the challenges encountered during the implementation process and proposes strategies for overcoming potential barriers. The findings of this research contribute to the ongoing discourse on the evolution of computer science and engineering education, advocating for a holistic approach that not only equips students with technical skills but also instills a sense of social responsibility.

Storyboards are a ubiquitous part of the creation process for various forms of media. Films and video games utilize storyboards during the early stages of their creation. In this stage of production authors have the opportunity to drastically edit their proposed scenes. However, any changes made to a storyboard require an artist to redraw/edit accordingly. As such, even storyboards that are intended to be a rough creation can consume resources that could otherwise be applied towards creating the actual product. Our proposed framework seeks to eliminate the need to manually create a storyboard by automatically generate it from a written description of the scene. Further, a rough animation (story reel) is dually created. We present a prototype system that takes a written script and first creates a keyframe-based storyboard. From these different keyframes an animation is presented in form of a video clip (story reel). A case study is used to show that there is potential in the process of taking a user's dynamic text input and creating an animated scene from the depicted storyboards. Any enhancements either on the Script-to-Storyboard or on the Storyboard-to-Story Reel aspects of the proposed framework would improve outcomes of the entire Script-to-Storyboard-to-Story Reel process.

Investigations into the effects of both negative and positive external stimuli for various types of animals have attracted a variety of scientific studies. These studies have primarily focused on understanding the effects of these stimuli, followed by subsequent recommendations for better animal welfare at the Zoo. However, the method of collecting, recording, and understanding data related to these external stimuli is not standardized. One example of these external stimuli is noise (or sound level), and the research question being studied often is how noise pollution affects animals' welfare. We create a rigorous process of collecting and recording data and use visualizations of noise data and its dispersion over time for better understanding of where and when the Zookeepers can go and analyze animal behavior for a more accurate assessment. We follow with recommendations of times and places for animals to be located in the Zoo environment to better their welfare.

Graduates distinguish themselves by being creative, innovative, and showing leadership, but such instructional topics are usually formally emphasized in business curricula. Computer Science students could minor in entrepreneurship or other business-related fields in order to foster their innovative mindset and obtain a business acumen that complements the technical expertise they obtain in their majors, but such minors usually require at least five additional courses. We discuss the formal incorporation of entrepreneurship in the computer science curriculum as part of a clinic model that includes real-world experiences, at the expense of two 1-credit hands-on clinics that can be embedded into the number of credits required for the computer science degree.

Given the ever-increasing use of technology in the teaching of various disciplines, one question that arises is who will develop and make technological teaching tools available to educators? In this paper we make the case for a model where non-computer science faculty provide project ideas to software engineering students and spend time in the role of "customers." In return, faculty members receive tailor-made software products that can be used to enhance teaching effectiveness and to engage students in active learning. Software engineering students benefit by having customers to interact with, a real project to exercise their skills on, and they also gain exposure to the types of software being used in the teaching of various disciplines. We present two case studies in which students enrolled in a semester-long software engineering course collaborated with faculty from the Department of Biomedicai Sciences or the Department of Biological Sciences to develop software that is being used by faculty to enhance learning experiences of medical students and undergraduate biology majors.

We present the results of evaluating four techniques for displaying group or cluster information overlaid on node-link diagrams: node coloring, GMap, BubbleSets, and LineSets. The contributions of the paper are three fold. First, we present quantitative results and statistical analyses of data from an online study in which approximately 800 subjects performed 10 types of group and network tasks in the four evaluated visualizations. Specifically, we show that BubbleSets is the best alternative for tasks involving group membership assessment; that visually encoding group information over basic node-link diagrams incurs an accuracy penalty of about 25 percent in solving network tasks; and that GMap's use of prominent group labels improves memorability. We also show that GMap's visual metaphor can be slightly altered to outperform BubbleSets in group membership assessment. Second, we discuss visual characteristics that can explain the observed quantitative differences in the four visualizations and suggest design recommendations. This discussion is supported by a small scale eye-tracking study and previous results from the visualization literature. Third, we present an easily extensible user study methodology.

Methodologies for complex systems diagnosis and verification have long been studied as part of systems engineering research. Most techniques involve decomposing the complex system into smaller connected components, and analyzing those. We describe the implementation and evaluation of a visualization tool which enhances drawings of physical components with information visualization artifacts for analyzing complex systems and their operating capability. Our visualization was designed to help users navigate through complex systems composed of multiple layers of components, identify if the system is ready to complete a task based on availability and performance of its components, and efficiently diagnose system malfunctions. A formal evaluation shows that our visualization tool enables users to diagnose complex systems faster than using conventional workflows.

In this paper we confront the stereotype which depicts a software engineer as an individual who is programming all day in his or her cubicle. We present an interactive, puzzle-based game, which is similar to Lemmings, to help students ranging from middle school to college juniors learn high-level concepts about the design phase of the software engineering life cycle. Object oriented design patterns are represented in our game in the form of actions that can be assigned to lemmings. The actions are metaphors for object oriented design patterns in software development, which means the student is not actually developing a design for a real software system. This could be an abstract and intimidating process. Instead, the student plays a puzzle-based game which is appealing especially to a younger audience. The key is the student is still using the same strategies that would be used in a real software project to develop a design to beat our game.

The quality of a graph drawing algorithm is often measured by its edge crossings, angular resolution, aspect ratio, and node labeling. Algorithms for drawing trees in general are segregated from algorithms for drawing graphs. In this paper we present a graph visualization system that uses a novel interconnection between a tree drawing algorithm and graph drawing techniques. First, the graph is transformed into a tree and nodes that have multiple parent connections within the graph are duplicated within the tree. While some of the connection information is lost during this transformation, the multiple connections can be regained by interactively displaying the details based on the degree of interest. We use an edgeless rings-based visualization which allows edge crossings and angular resolution issues to be eliminated and has a desirable aspect ratio of 1. Finally, a circular labeling method is used that provides user-friendly labels that do not overlap and clearly show node affiliation.

Graphs, generally used as data structures in computer science applications, have steadily shown a growth in mapping various types of relationships, from maps to computer networks to social networks. As graph layouts and visualizations have been at the forefront of graph drawing research for decades, it consequently led to aesthetic heuristics that not only generated better visualizations and aesthetically appealing graphs but also improved readability and understanding of the graphs. A variety of approaches examines aesthetics of nodes, edges, or graph layout, and related readability metrics. In this paper we focus on the edge crossing problem and propose a solution that incorporates Gestalt principles to improve graph aesthetics and readability. We introduce the concept of breaks in edges at edge crossings. A break is a gap in an edge drawing occurring in the vicinity of an edge crossing. At every edge crossing, one of the incident edges is broken, which will prevent any unintentional Gestalts that occur at edge crossings that reduce the readability of a graph drawing. We present our preliminary results and user studies that show that this technique could play a role in improving graph readability.

In the realm of computer graphics, methods used to control a user's point of view in a three-dimensional world are rather convoluted and are often tightly coupled to the rendering system used. In response to this issue, we have developed a robust camera controller system that provides an intuitive interface for visualization and simulation programmers, while removing renderer dependencies completely. Our system follows common object oriented design principles to encapsulate the complex mathematics and computations involved in synthetic camera manipulation, providing a firm foundation for high-level camera features. We provide a use case where students with no graphics experience developed a visualization system using our camera controller.

The dimensionality of soccer statistics relating to goalkeeper specific data can be difficult to interpret. Leveraging our existing statistical analytics tool, Soccer Scoop, we developed a goalkeeper visualization add-on that can assist a team manager. With the newly developed goalkeeper visualization tool, a team manager can compare a single goalkeeper between two games, measure the overall performance of the goalkeeper both for games played at home or away, as well as to devise the appropriate training exercises needed to strengthen any visible weakness. To keep with the continuity of the visualization styles of our first tool, Soccer Scoop, the goalkeeper visualization applies similar techniques, such as glyphs, details on demand, color, and Gestalt principles.

The analysis of large sums of soccer statistics can be extremely difficult if the data is not presented graphically. As a result, we developed an application, titled Soccer Scoop, which provides two separate visualizations that can aid a soccer team manager. With our application, a team manager can compare two players on different teams, analyze a particular player before signing them to a contract, measure the performance of a particular player at different positions, generate practice exercises, and determine if a particular player plays better on the road or at home. The visualizations used in our application apply information visualization techniques, such as glyphs, modified star plots, details on demand, color, and gestalt principles.

We introduce the concept of coloring close and crossing edges in graph drawings with perceptually opposing colors making them individually more distinguishable and reducing edge-crossing effects. We define a "closeness" metric on edges as a combination of distance, angle and crossing. We use the inverse of this metric to compute a color embedding in the L*a*b* color space and assign "close" edges colors that are perceptually far apart. We present the following results: a distance metric on graph edges, a method of coloring graph edges, and anecdotal evidence that this technique can improve the reading of graph edges.

The analysis of large sums of data can be extremely difficult to perform if the data is not presented graphically. As a result, many graphing techniques have been developed, such as scatter plots, histograms. Generally, the main purpose of graphically displaying data is to do one of two things: First, to find the general average of where most of the data lies. Second, to find the outliers, the data points that are most distant from the others. Our visualization will attempt to find both by using a multitude of common graphing techniques to expand upon the traditional star glyph and create a new way of graphing data. These techniques include clustering, using color as identifiers, and 3D graphing capabilities to present more data that would not be possible of being shown in a two dimensional environment. We apply our techniques to compare several air traffic trajectory predictors currently being analyzed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

It is widely recommended by both academia and industry that today's technology and software engineering students be well prepared for industry before graduation, especially given global outsourcing and other trends. Various methods have been developed to ensure student readiness, including co-ops and capstone courses. These approaches increasingly use real-world projects for their benefits to industry and often to the community at large. In this paper, we argue that students can be prepared to effectively join industry and keep the US technology workforce competitive through a curriculum that includes a theoretical software engineering course with real-world projects and the collaboration of paired teams across two or more universities. We present a case study of a successful teaching experience that features these aspects, and describe the outcome along with the unique perspective of a participating student.

General trees are usually displayed as planar straight-line grid drawings which provide an easily understandable structure to the viewer. Current general tree drawing algorithms have one common problem: their drawings on high degree trees produce many small angles, which makes it difficult to distinguish edges. The algorithm we propose in this paper allows the user to provide an angular coefficient and then employs the 'best-effort-delivery' to draw edges such that the angles are above the angular coefficient. It allows the non-root nodes to place their children within a maximum of three quads of the Cartesian plane. When a node has too many children, resulting in an impossibility of achieving angles above the specified angular coefficient, our algorithm distributes all remaining children evenly among the three quads.

Trees are usually drawn using planar straight-line drawings. [2] presented an algorithm for constructing a planar straight-line grid drawing of a degree-d (general) tree with area 0(eta) and any pre-specified aspect ratio in the range [eta-alpha,etaalpha], where 0 < alpha < 1 is any constant, in O(etalogeta) time. Unfortunately, the algorithm of [2] is not suitable for practical use. The main problem is that the constant hidden in the "Oh " notation for area is quite large (for binary trees was 3900). In this paper, we have made several improvements to the algorithm, which make it suitable for practical use. We have also conducted an experiment on this newer version of the algorithm for randomly-generated general trees with up to 50,000 nodes. Our experiment shows that it constructs area-efficient drawings in practice, with area at most 19 times the number of nodes.

An information hierarchy is a collection of relational information that is arranged in a ranking organization where each entity is subject to a single other entity, except for the top (root) element. The usefulness of a visualization of an information hierarchy depends on its capability of conveying the information quickly and clearly. The interaction with the information hierarchy allows a user to further analyze its underlying structures and relationships, which is essential for the effectiveness of the visualization. In this paper we present a novel method to interactively visualize information hierarchies in real-time. We use the World Wide Web as an application example of our techniques. The result is a novel Web browsing and visualization method with an innovative combination of features: (i) Web data is retrieved and displayed in real-time (i.e. Web data is not pre-recorded), (ii) browsing and visualization are synchronized together in the same interface, (iii) tree-based visualization engine, and (iv) space-efficient display of visualization. Our study shows that users are able to orient themselves better in cyberspace and locate Web pages of interest faster.

Many algorithms have been designed to visualize binary trees efficiently with respect to a quality measure. While each algorithm is suitable for drawing particular categories of binary trees, an effort to compile these algorithms to maximize the quality of drawings has not been realized. Our first step is to create a system that determines the type of a binary tree and then selects an algorithm to draw the tree depending upon the specified quality measures. Currently, our system recognizes six types of binary trees (AVL, Complete, Fibonacci, Random, Unbalanced-tothe- left, Unbalanced-to-the-right) and allows the user to choose from eleven quality measures (Area, Aspect Ratio, Total Edge Length, Maximum Edge Length, Uniform Edge Length, Closest Leaf, Farthest Leaf, Size, Minimum Angle Size, Average Angle Size, Angular Resolution). Experiments show that our adaptive visualization system outperforms any system using a single binary tree drawing algorithm. In addition, our approach allows the user to select multiple quality measures and automatically detects the best available binary tree drawing algorithm.