The 8th Annual

NC State University

Undergraduate Summer Research Symposium

 

Design Tech abstracts


Abstracts are listed in alphabetical order by the last name of the corresponding author.

 

 

 

 

Student Author(s): 

Arehart, Tyler S.

Gilliam, Ryan E.

Mennecke, Britta L.

Home Institution:

NCSU

Winston Salem State University

Iowa State University

Program:

Design Tech

College:

Engineering and Technology

Department(s):

Computer Science

Research Mentor(s): 

Benjamin A. Watson/Computer Science

Jordan R. Benson/Computer Science

Title of Presentation:

Skinning Skimmer: News with Aesthetic Appeal

 

 

Our research is an extension of a news visualization program called Skimmer. The program collects news articles from online sources, analyzes them to find important words, and renders the words in clusters based on how frequently they co-occur. Articles are collected based on a given query to any of BBC News, Digg, Google Blog Search, Google News, Summize, Technorati, and Yahoo News. Skimmer can then poll these sources periodically to adapt the visualization to a developing story. From the articles, key words are chosen for high occurrence and high co-occurrence with other words. These key words are displayed in the visualization as elements which drift around, attempting to co-locate with one another according to co-occurrence found in the articles. Ideally, the words form meaningful clusters once the visualization reaches a steady state.  Our contribution was to make Skimmer more engaging with a 3D version of the visualization which provides a metaphor for the program’s functions. The 3D visualization consists of an area on the sea floor where the key words float in bubbles. An animated crab attracts attention to the visualization, and provides plausible agency for the removal of outdated words. The crab also periodically chooses a word and triggers a rapid serial visual presentation of a related article. Additional 3D elements, including fish and a treasure chest, strengthen the context and visual appeal of the scene. Beyond the visualization, we enabled the program to analyze HTML-formatted books of the type found at gutenberg.org  

 

 

Student Author(s): 

Clay, Paul

Clemens, Ryan

Home Institution:

Reed College

SUNY IT

Program:

Design Tech

College:

 

Department(s):

 

Research Mentor(s): 

Christopher Healey

Title of Presentation:

WallView3D: Visualization of Facebook Wall Posts

With the growing popularity of Facebook, researchers in many disciplines are analyzing how Facebook is used and how it affects its users. There is a need for effective visualization of Facebook data, but visualization tools available have mainly been limited to non-temporal node-link-based graphs of social network structures. Utilizing the Facebook developer's API, WallView3D visualizes the nominal and demographic data that is readily available through Facebook profile wall posts. WallView3D uses a TFIDF algorithm to parse and categorize textual wall data and also collects demographic data of the wall owners and the wall-posters. The application displays the information over time in a variety of 2D and 3D graph styles, utilizing the Java2D and openGL API's. The GUI allows for granular levels of customization, accommodating both new and repeat users, and all the visualizations can be explored using the GUI components, mouse, and keyboard. Using WallView3D, users can quickly gain insight into data trends in their Facebook friend network.

 

 

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