Second Life for science

Yesterday we had also an extensive demo of Second Life, the virtual world. Karl Harrison from Oxford University had built the "Oxford island" inside the Second Life world, to test how this concept could help science teaching. I do not understand how this concept could help, but surely the world has an interesting interaction model.

Similar experience a grandmother participant to the conference that meets her grandchild in a virtual world park.

Run, run, GRC conference!

Two conference days passed so fast!

Scientific sessions and the poster area are full of interesting themes: from brain studies of perception to what chemistry students have in their minds. I like this interdisciplinarity. I like to mix ideas not only from the scientific visualization area. Maybe some new idea spark in the mind, maybe not. In any case it is enriching me.

One nice idea is to start the question time with five minutes of (forced? suggested? encouraged?) discussion with your seat neighbors. Yesterday the discussion continued also after the session in front of a beer.

But there are also 'undercover' activities: Monday an introduction to Flash; yesterday a Jmol tutorial and a GeoWall presentation.

• Flash: I do not know if could be of interest to us, but it is really simple to create and animated 2D application. Various professors use it to explain concepts or to make interactive demonstrations.

• Jmol: with the principal developer teaching, nothing less! Latest version rivals standard chem viz tools.

• GeoWall: cheap alternative for stereo projection screens. It uses polarized glasses to separate L and R info.

Conference starts

Seems the first day at the college: old friends reunions, laughs, ...

Before the two after-dinner sessions, an official from the GRC organization remembered (strongly remembered) the rules: no public relation of conference content.

Interesting rule: the rationale is to remove every possible block that could hinder the free discussion of advanced topics or new research lines. I agree, but this means here I can only post my sensations and the (public) titles of the talks.

So the two first sessions:

1. On visual perception: half known phenomenas, half a new effect that elicited a general "Wow!" from the audience.
2. On quaternions. Known mathematics, but some nice applications. Same of them were like an illusionist show.

Was hard to remain awake. But an interesting experiment was attempted: before questions, five minutes the people were forced to discuss together on the talk content. Nice method to make connections.

Design workshop ended

Last half day for the Visualization Design Workshop at the Gordon Research Conference. The good things always finish...

The final exercise of the workshop presented four ideas on how to redesign a visualization. Here are some comments on mine. But the best visualization was the animation of a protein docking made for illustration, not exploration. Amazing!

Then Barbara Tversky spoke on External Representations and especially on Animation usage.

Interesting:

• Animation is hard to perceive
• Animations are conceived as discrete steps
• It is showing, not explaining

That means, that I should reconsider how molecular animations are made. Currently they are simply the translation into images of the data received. Why I'm not able to extract important points? Why the sequence is never segmented into "worth note" and "transition" parts.

As usual the available time is the main constrain together with the difficulty to understand what the user want to demonstrate with the movie.

After dinner, the real Gordon Research Conference begins. Nice for the ones of us that are still not synchronized with the time zone...

GRC - The campus

The conference is in the Bryant University campus. For someone not used at the American campuses, it is really impressive: it is new and it is rich. The university has only financial and economic faculties. And that explains everything...

The student dormitory instead are quite poor. An educational method or what?

But the seminary room, has incredibly comfortable chairs and big desks. It helps a lot the attention.

Not to say, wireless everywhere. In the afternoon I want to try under the trees.

As a student, would I want to stay here? I don't know. It is far from everywhere. Seems to me you are forced to study a lot.

The Design Workshop

Before the Gordon Research Conference start I'm attending the pre-conference workshop on Design Principles for Creating Effective Visualizations.

It is short lectures and group work. A lot of group work!

Here are some sparse notes:

• Visualization is the use of graphical techniques to convey info and support reasoning
• Representation: The Mike Hann's "Ceci n'est pas une molecule". We are showing something that highlight some aspect of the original data, but it is not the original data. I have to read the handout form a Donald Norman book (Things that make us smart).
• The enormous power of representation that can change significantly the cost of the insight.
• Distributed cognition: it is the internal representation plus the external cognition artifacts that play together
• Visualization challenge: Design a representation that uses graphical techniques effectively. Design needs three interlocked disciplines: psychology, domain knowledge and art&design. The last is always forgotten.
• Then divided in 4 groups we selected good/bad visualizations. I presented the Ute Roehrig Alzhaimer proteins aggregation and the Davide Branduardi energy landscape (see my workshop materials page)
• Constructive criticisms: Do the audience knows what they are going to see? Challenge of conventions. The landscape is good because matches everyday experience (valleys, things going down).
• From another work (movement of lipids in a cellular membrane): use of highlight to direct attention. Animation of H atoms confusing, need same form of traces to be understandable. Good idea the use of zoom to attract attention.
• Unfortunately not open, but on flashchem.nelson.com there are nice examples of interactive Flash usage for concept explanation.
• Barbara presented idea on cognitive design principles. The viz designer must uncover the mental model of the viz user. Use the context to disambiguate the message.
  
• Color usage ideas: known guidelines. But a new ideas: hue for periodic data. Hue is circular, so can convey ideas on things like phase (that it is circular). It also show very clearly discontinuities.
• Space usage: look at cartography. To show one thing better, the cartographer must absolutely distort something else.
• The viz scientists learn by observing. Learn by examples.
• Design a visualization. Do not lock into a solution too early!

Today we must present a design to make more effective one presented visualization. More on this later. But seems we are not able to select one visualization...

The Gordon Research Conference

I'm near Providence RI for the Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education.

Do you know what are those conferences? They are not usual conferences with publications, proceedings and so on. The main idea is to join people from diverse fields but with a common interest to freely discuss and exchange ideas. For this reason it is strictly prohibited to make any reference to work presented at the conference.

To quote from the home page:

The Gordon Research Conferences promote discussions and the free exchange of ideas at the research frontiers of the biological, chemical and physical sciences. Scientists with common professional interests come together for a full week of intense discussion and examination of the most advanced aspects of their field. These Conferences provide a valuable means of disseminating information and ideas in a way that cannot be achieved through the usual channels of communication - publications and presentations at large scientific meetings.

My impressions till now:

• The atmosphere is the one of a college or school, not of a conference. No one seems urged to demonstrate anything
• Multidisciplinarity at the top! Psychologists, chemistry professors, educators, a documentary maker, biologists...
• Real interest for each other work
• Close contact with famous names in the visualization area: Pat Hanrahan, Barbara Tversky
  

Now I'm in the middle of a pre-conference workshop on Design Principles for Creating Effective Visualizations. More on this later.