CSC 696D - Advanced Topics in Visualization and Graphics

Spring 2022

Meets: M/W 5:00-6:15pm, Gould-Simpson, Rm 701
Instructor: Joshua A. Levine
Office: Online via Zoom, Schedule via Calendly
Office Hours: M 10-11am, W 3:30-4:30pm

Course Syllabus
D2L
Piazza

Course Calendar

(tentative, subject to change)

Week	Date	Monday	Date	Wednesday

1	Jan 10	-- No Class --	Jan 12	Introduction
2	Jan 17	-- MLK Day --	Jan 19	Reading
3	Jan 24	Communicating	Jan 26	Literature Review 1-1
4	Jan 31	Literature Review 1-2	Feb 02	Literature Review 1-3
5	Feb 07	Literature Review 1-4	Feb 09	Literature Review 1-5
6	Feb 14	Proposal Pitches	Feb 16	Literature Review 2-1
7	Feb 21	Literature Review 2-2	Feb 23	Literature Review 2-3
8	Feb 28	Literature Review 2-4	Mar 02	Literature Review 2-5
9	Mar 07	-- Spring Break --	Mar 09	-- Spring Break --
10	Mar 14	Project Updates 1	Mar 16	Literature Review 3-1
11	Mar 21	Literature Review 3-2	Mar 23	Literature Review 3-3
12	Mar 28	Literature Review 3-4	Mar 30	Literature Review 3-5
13	Apr 04	Project Updates 2	Apr 06	Literature Review 4-1
14	Apr 11	Literature Review 4-2	Apr 13	Literature Review 4-3
15	Apr 18	Literature Review 4-4	Apr 20	Literature Review 4-5
16	Apr 25	Write-up Workshop	Apr 27	Final Projects
17	May 02	Final Projects	May 04	Final Projects

Highlighted dates have a written project milestone due by 11:59pm.

Boxed dates correspond to the nearest class day to the deadlines for dropping (without a W) and withdrawing for this semester. See Spring 2022 Graduate Dates and Deadlines for complete details.

Lecture 01 - Introduction

Date: January 12, 2022

Required Reading:

Optional Reading:

The Value of Visualization. Jarke van Wijk. Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization Conference, pp. 79-86, 2005.
The best stats you've ever seen - Hans Rosling (ted.com)

Lecture 02 - Reading

Date: January 19, 2022

Required Reading:

How to Read a Visualization Research Paper: Extracting the Essentials. Robert S. Laramee. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (IEEE CG&A), Vol. 31, No. 3, May/June 2011, pages 78-82.
How to read a paper. S. Keshav. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 37(3) July 2007.

Optional Reading:

Cultivating Your Research Taste - Nick Feamster (greatresearch.org)
Research Patterns - Nick Feamster (greatresearch.org)

Lecture 03 - Communicating

Date: January 24, 2022

Required Reading:

Process and Pitfalls in Writing Information Visualization Research Papers. Tamara Munzner. Chapter from Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives. Andreas Kerren, John T. Stasko, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Chris North, eds. Springer LNCS Volume 4950, p 134-153, 2008.

Optional Reading:

Storytelling 101: Writing Tips for Academics - Nick Feamster (greatresearch.org)
3 shell scripts to improve your writing - Matt Might (matt.might.net)
Presenting a Technical Talk - Nick Feamster (greatresearch.org). See also the more recent How to Give a Sharp Technical Talk by Nick Feamster (medium.com)
The secret structure of great talks - Nancy Duarte (ted.com)
Giving an Academic Talk - Jonathan Shewchuk (eecs.berkeley.edu)
How to Give an Academic Talk, v5.2 - Paul N. Edwards (umich.edu)
10 tips for academic talks - Matt Might (matt.might.net)
How to give a good research talk - Simon Peyton Jones (microsoft.com). Note the additional links on writing papers/proposals

Lecture 04 - Literature Review 1-1

Date: January 26, 2022

Required Reading:

Josh presents Jurassic Mark: Inattentional Blindness for a Datasaurus Reveals that Visualizations are Explored, not Seen by Tal Boger, Steven B. Most, Steven L. Franconeri. VIS 2021 Short Papers. (note: try the experiment 1a or 1b prior to reading the paper: https://datasaurus-vis.herokuapp.com/.)

Lecture 05 - Literature Review 1-2

Date: January 31, 2022

Required Reading:

Jacob presents Graph Drawing by Stochastic Gradient Descent by Jonathan X. Zheng, Samraat Pawar, Dan F.M. Goodman. TVCG 2019.

Lecture 06 - Literature Review 1-3

Date: February 02, 2022

Required Reading:

Athan presents SmartCube: An Adaptive Data Management Architecture for the Real-Time Visualization of Spatiotemporal Datasets by Can Liu, Cong Wu, Hanning Shao, Xiaoru Yuan. VIS 2019.
Xiyu presents Visualization for Spectators in Cybersecurity Competitions by Chao Peng, David Schwartz, Daryl Johnson, Bill Stackpole, Chad Weeden, Jacob Marcovecchio, Drake Richards, Chris Fogle, Christopher Brown, and Victoria Walrond. VizSec 2020.

Lecture 07 - Literature Review 1-4

Date: February 07, 2022

Required Reading:

Isabel presents Text-to-Viz: Automatic Generation of Infographics from Natural Language Statements by Weiwei Cui, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yun Wang, He Huang, Bei Chen, Lei Fang, Haidong Zhang, Jian-Guang Lou, Dongmei Zhang. VIS 2019.
Pasindu presents Interactive Visualization of Terascale Data in the Browser: Fact or Fiction? by Will Usher, Valerio Pascucci. LDAV 2020.

Lecture 08 - Literature Review 1-5

Date: February 09, 2022

Required Reading:

Jake presents A Memory Efficient Encoding for Ray Tracing Large Unstructured Data by Ingo Wald, Nathan Morrical, Stefan Zellmann. VIS 2021.
Dan presents Visualizing the hidden activity of artificial neural networks by Paulo E. Rauber, Samuel G. Fadel, Alexandre X. Falcão, and Alexandru C. Telea. VIS 2016.

Lecture 10 - Literature Review 2-1

Date: February 16, 2022

Required Reading:

Dan presents Summit: Scaling Deep Learning Interpretability by Visualizing Activation and Attribution Summarizations by Fred Hohman, Haekyu Park, Caleb Robinson, Duen Horng Chau. VIS 2019.

Lecture 11 - Literature Review 2-2

Date: February 21, 2022

Required Reading:

Jacob presents DRGraph: An Efficient Graph Layout Algorithm for Large-Scale Graphs by Dimensionality Reduction by Minfeng Zhu, Wei Chen, Yuanzhe Hu, Yuxuan Hou, Liangjun Liu, Kaiyuan Zhang. VIS 2020.

Lecture 12 - Literature Review 2-3

Date: February 23, 2022

Required Reading:

Isabel presents Exploring How Personality Models Information Visualization Preferences by Tomás Alves, Bárbara Ramalho, Daniel Gonçalves, Sandra Gama, Joana Henriques-Calado. VIS 2020.
Xiyu presents A Survey of Visualization Systems for Network Security by Hadi Shiravi, Ali Shiravi, Ali A. Ghorbani. IEEE TVCG 2012.

Lecture 13 - Literature Review 2-4

Date: February 28, 2022

Required Reading:

Jake presents A Domain-Oblivious Approach for Learning Concise Representations of Filtered Topological Spaces for Clustering by Yu Qin, Brittany Terese Fasy, Carola Wenk, Brian Summa. VIS 2021.

Lecture 14 - Literature Review 2-5

Date: March 02, 2022

Required Reading:

Athan presents A Simple Pipeline for Coherent Grid Maps by Wouter Meulemans, Max Sondag, Bettina Speckmann. VIS 2020.
Pasindu presents Visualizing Graph Neural Networks with CorGIE: Corresponding a Graph to Its Embedding by Zipeng Liu, Yang Wang, Jurgen Bernard, Tamara Munzner. IEEE TVCG 2022.

Lecture 16 - Literature Review 3-1

Date: March 16, 2022

Required Reading:

Isabel presents A Mixed-Initiative Approach to Reusing Infographic Charts by Weiwei Cui, Jinpeng Wang, He Huang, Yun Wang, Chin-Yew Lin, Haidong Zhang, Dongmei Zhang. VIS 2021.

Lecture 17 - Literature Review 3-2

Date: March 21, 2022

Required Reading:

Jake presents FlowSense: A Natural Language Interface for Visual Data Exploration within a Dataflow System by Bowen Yu, Cláudio T. Silva. VIS 2019.
Jacob presents Joint t-SNE for Comparable Projections of Multiple High-Dimensional Datasets. by Yinqiao Wang, Lu Chen, Jaemin Jo, Yunhai Wang. VIS 2021.

Lecture 18 - Literature Review 3-3

Date: March 23, 2022

Required Reading:

Pasindu presents NeuroCartography: Scalable Automatic Visual Summarization of Concepts in Deep Neural Networks by Haekyu Park,Nilaksh Das, Rahul Duggal, Austin P. Wright, Omar Shaikh, Fred Hohman, Duen Horng Polo Chau. VIS 2021.

Lecture 19 - Literature Review 3-4

Date: March 28, 2022

Required Reading:

Xiyu presents Ropmate: Visually assisting the creation of rop-based exploits. by Marco Angelini, Graziano Blasilli, Pietro Borrello, Emilio Coppa,Daniele Cono D’Elia, Serena Ferracci, Simone Lenti, Giuseppe Santucci. VizSec 2018.
Dan presents Explaining Vulnerabilities to Adversarial Machine Learning through Visual Analytics by Yuxin Ma, Tiankai Xie, Jundong Li, Ross Maciejewski. VIS 2019.

Lecture 20 - Literature Review 3-5

Date: March 30, 2022

Required Reading:

Athan presents Topology Density Map for Urban Data Visualization and Analysis by Zezheng Feng, Haotian Li, Wei Zeng, Shuang-Hua Yang, Huamin Qu. TVCG 2021.

Lecture 22 - Literature Review 4-1

Date: April 06, 2022

Required Reading:

Pasindu presents Human-in-the-loop Extraction of Interpretable Concepts in Deep Learning Models by Zhenge Zhao, Panpan Xu, Carlos Scheidegger, Liu Ren. VIS 2021.

Lecture 23 - Literature Review 4-2

Date: April 11, 2022

Required Reading:

Xiyu presents Towards Visual Analytics Dashboards for Provenance-driven Static Application Security Testing by Andreas Schreiber, Tim Sonnekalb, Lynn von Kurnatowski. VizSec 2021.
Dan presents A Markov Model of Users’ Interactive Behavior in Scatterplots by Emily Wall, Arup Arcalgud, Kuhu Gupta, Andrew Jo. VIS 2019.

Lecture 24 - Literature Review 4-3

Date: April 13, 2022

Required Reading:

Athan presents DDLVis: Real-time Visual Query of Spatiotemporal Data Distribution via Density Dictionary Learning by Chenhui Li, George Baciu, Yunzhe Wang, Junjie Chen, Changbo Wang. VIS 2021.

Lecture 25 - Literature Review 4-4

Date: April 18, 2022

Required Reading:

Jacob presents Scalability of Network Visualisation from a Cognitive Load Perspective by Vahan Yoghourdjian, Yalong Yang, Tim Dwyer, Lee Lawrence, Michael Wybrow, Kim Marriott. VIS 2020.

Lecture 26 - Literature Review 4-5

Date: April 20, 2022

Required Reading:

Isabel presents TacticFlow: Visual Analytics of Ever-Changing Tactics in Racket Sports by Jiang Wu, Dongyu Liu, Ziyang Guo, Qingyang Xu, Yingcai Wu. VIS 2021.

Literature Reviews
Assigned/Due: Rolling

P1 - Proposal/Pitch
Assigned: Jan 26
Due: Feb 16 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Feb 23

P2 - Progress Update 1
Assigned: Feb 16
Due: Mar 16 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Mar 23

P3 - Progress Update 2
Assigned: Mar 16
Due: Apr 06 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Apr 13

P4 - Final Submission
Assigned: Apr 06
Due: May 04 11:59:59 PM
Graded: May 11