Teaching Archives - Human-Computer Interaction & Visual Analyitics Reasearch Group (vis) at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h

Paper accepted at VARE 2019

21/06/2019/in Allgemein, Publication, Research, Scitics, Thesis /by Dirk Burkhardt

At the next conference in Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education (VARE 2019), we are happy that out paper toward mobile visual trend analytics was accepted for presentation. The conference takes place from Sep. 18 to Sep. 20, 2019 in Kisbon, Portugal. The VARE is an annual event that brings together trainers in all areas of knowledge and educational levels as well as researchers and scientists from virtual technologies as well data advanced visualization and virtualization. In general, main aim is to improve teaching and training, and data analysis through virtual and augmented technologies use and to discuss problems and solutions in mentioned areas to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research.

Paper: A Mobile Visual Analytics Approach for Instant Trend Analysis in Mobile Contexts

Abstract:
The awareness of market trends becomes relevant for a broad number of market branches, in particular the more they are challenged by the digitalization. Trend analysis solutions help business executives identifying upcoming trends early. But solid market analysis takes their time and are often not available on consulting or strategy discussions. This circumstance often leads to unproductive debates where no clear strategy, technology etc. could be identified. Therefore, we propose a mobile visual trend analysis approach that enables a quick trend analysis to identify at least the most relevant and irrelevant aspects to focus debates on the relevant options. To enable an analysis like this, the exhausting analysis on powerful workstations with large screens has to adopted to mobile devices within a mobile behavior. Our main contribution is the therefore a new approach of a mobile knowledge cockpit, which provides different analytical visualizations within and intuitive interaction design.

Link to paper/fulltext: -comming soon-

Demo video:

Information Science: The new degree program at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences

23/04/2019/in h_da, Lecture /by Dirk Burkhardt

Digitization contributes to the accumulation of knowledge in immense amounts of data, but often unstructured and widely scattered. Information Scientists bring this knowledge together and make it usable for business and society. The new study program Information Science at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt (h_da) trains students to become experts in the professional handling of data, information and knowledge. The bachelor and master program starts for the first time in the winter semester 2019/20 and replaces the previous course Information Science. Applications are possible from the 15th of May.

“Since digitization processes and rapid technological changes have a major impact on companies, information scientists also contribute to future and innovation processes,” emphasizes Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi. He is in charge of the bachelor’s and master’s degree program Information Science. His graduates also qualify for leadership positions in companies, institutions, media organizations, administrations or libraries as well as for research activities. The master’s degree also qualifies for a doctorate. There are perspectives at the Hochschule Darmstadt in the cross-university doctoral program “Applied Computer Science”, in which research group is involved.

The full news article (in German) can be found at:
https://www.h-da.de/news-anzeigen/meldung-einzelansicht/news/information-science-neuer-studiengang-an-der-hochschule-darmstadt/

Information about the application and the admission requirements can be found at:
https://h-da.de/bewerben

Detailed information on the Information Science program can be found at:
https://iw.h-da.de/

Two papers in Journal of ICTE in Transportation and Logistics 2018

12/03/2019/in Allgemein, Demo, Publication, Research, Scitics, Teaching, Technology /by Dirk Burkhardt

We are glad to announce that two submission of us were accepted in the Elsevier journal Procedia Computer Science of ICTE in Transportation and Logistics 2018. The ICTE in Transportation and Logistics is an interdisciplinary annual issue operating on the edge between transportation, logistics and computer science. The aim of the journal is promotion of introduction the latest IT achievements and active research methods in transportation and logistics involving citizens in training and decision making through participation in social networking. The audience of the journal are academicians, municipalities, professional associations, public and private funded organizations, industry professionals, researchers and students. The accepted papers are:

#1 Visual analytical dashboards for comparative analytical tasks – a case study on mobility and transportation

Mobility, logistics and transportation are emerging fields of research and application. Humans’ mobility behavior plays an increasing role for societal challenges. Beside the societal challenges these areas are strongly related to technologies and innovations. Gathering information about emerging technologies plays an increasing role for the entire research in this ares. Humans’ information processing can be strongly supported by Visual Analytics that combines automatic modelling and interactive visualizations. The juxtapose orchestration of interactive visualization enables gathering more information in a shorter time. We propose in this paper an approach that goes beyond the established methods of dashboarding and enables visualizing different databases, data-sets and sub-sets of data with juxtaposed visual interfaces. Our approach should be seen as an expandable method. Our main contributions are an in-depth analysis of visual task models and an approach for juxtaposing visual layouts as visual dashboards to enable solving complex tasks. We illustrate our main outcome through a case study that investigates the area of mobility and illustrates how complex analytical tasks can be performed easily by combining different visual interfaces.

Link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.01.117

#2 Visual legal analytics – A visual approach to analyze law-conflicts of e-Services for e-Mobility and transportation domain

The impact of the electromobility has next to the automotive industry also an increasing impact on the transportation and logistics domain. In particular the today’s starting switches to electronic trucks/scooter lead to massive changes in the organization and planning in this field. Public funding or tax reduction for environment friendly solutions forces also the growth of new mobility and transportation services. However, the vast changes in this domain and the high number of innovations of new technologies and services leads also into a critical legal uncertainty. The clarification of a legal status for a new technology or service can become cost intensive in a dimension that in particular startups could not invest. In this paper we therefore introduce a new approach to identify and analyze legal conflicts based on a business model or plan against existing laws. The intention is that an early awareness of critical legal aspect could enable an early adoption of the planned service to ensure its legality. Our main contribution is distinguished in two parts. Firstly, a new Norm-graph visualization approach to show laws and legal aspects in an easier understandable manner. And secondly, a Visual Legal Analytics approach to analyze legal conflicts e.g. on the basis of a business plans. The Visual Legal Analytics approach aims to provide a visual analysis interface to validate the automatically identified legal conflicts resulting from the pre-processing stage with a graphical overview about the derivation down to the law roots and the option to check the original sources to get further details. At the end analyst can so verify conflicts as relevant and resolve it by advancing e.g. the business plan or as irrelevant. An evaluation performed with lawyers has proofed our approach.

Link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.01.170

Thesis Presentation: User-Centered Scientific Publication Research and Exploration in Digital Libraries

05/12/2018/in Allgemein, Teaching, Thesis, TU Darmstadt /by Dirk Burkhardt

When: 10/12/2018 15:30 Where: Frauhofer IGD, Fraunhoferstr. 5, Room 220 Who: Namitha Chandrashekara (Author), Dipl.-Inf. Dirk Burkhardt (Advisor/Co-Supervisor), Prof. Dr. Arjan Kuijper (Supervisor) What: Master Thesis – “User-Centered Scientific Publication Research and Exploration in Digital Libraries” Abstract: Scientific research is the basis for innovations. Surveying the research papers is an essential step in the process of research. It is vital to elaborate the intended writing of state of the art. Due to the rapid growth in scientific and technical discoveries, there is an increasing availability of publications. The traditional method of publishing the research papers includes physical libraries and books. These become hard to document with the rise in the number of publications produced. Due to the above mentioned problem, online archives for scientific publications have become more prominent in the scientific community. The availability of the search engines and digital libraries help the researchers in identifying the scientific publications. However, they provide limited search capabilities and visual interface. Most of the search engines have a single field to search and provides basic filtering of the data. Therefore, even with popular search engines, it is hard for the user to survey the research papers as it limits the user to search based on simple keywords. The relationships across multiple fields of the publications are also not considered such as to find the related papers and papers based on the citations or references. The main aim of the thesis is to develop a visual access to the digital libraries based on the scientific research and exploration. It helps the user in writing scientific papers. A scientific research and exploration model is developed based on the previous information visualization model for visual trend analysis with digital libraries, and with consideration of the research process. The principles from Visual Seeking Mantra are incorporated to have an interactive user interface that enhances the user experience. In the scope of this work, a research on Human Computer Interaction, particularly considering the aspects of user interface design are done. An overview of the scientific research, its types and various aspects of data analysis are researched. Different research models, existing approaches and tools that help the researchers in literature survey are also researched. The architecture and the implementation details of scientific research and exploration that provides visual access to digital libraries are presented.

Thesis Presentation: Visual Trend Analysis on Digital Semantic Library Data for Innovation Management

08/11/2018/in Allgemein, Demo, Scitics, Teaching, Technology, Thesis, TU Darmstadt /by Dirk Burkhardt

When: 12/11/2018 16:00 Where: Frauhofer IGD, Fraunhoferstr. 5, Room 0.73 Who: Ranveer Purey (Author), Dipl.-Inf. Dirk Burkhardt (Coordinator/Co-Supervisor), Prof. Dr. Arjan Kuijper (Supervisor) What: Master Thesis – “Visual Trend Analysis on Digital Semantic Library Data for Innovation Management” Abstract: The amount of scientific data published online has been witnessing massive growth in the recent years. This has led to exponential growth in the amount of data stored in digital libraries (DLs) such as springer, eurographics, digital bibliography and library Project (dblp), etc. One of the major challenges is to prevent users from getting lost in irrelevant search results, when they try to retrieve information in order to get meaningful insights from these digital libraries. This problem is known as information overload. Other challenge is the quality of data in digital libraries. A quality of data can be affected by factors such as missing information, absence of links to external databases or data is not well structured, and the data is not semantically annotated. Apart from data quality, one more challenge is the fact that, there are tools available which help users in retrieving and visualizing the information from large data sets, but these tools lack one or the other basic requirements like data mining, visualizations, interaction techniques etc. These issues and challenges have led to increase in the research in the field of visual analytics, it is a combination of data processing, information visualization, and human computer interaction disciplines. The main goal of this thesis is to overcome the information overload problem and the challenges mentioned above. This can be achieved by using digital library named SciGraph by springer, which serves as a very rich source of semantically annotated data. The data from SciGraph can be used in combination with data integration, data mining and information visualization techniques in order to aid users in decision making process and perform visual trend analysis on digital semantic library data. This concept would be designed and developed as a part of innovation management process, which helps transforming innovative ideas into reality using a structured process. In this thesis, a conceptual model for performing visual trend analysis on digital semantic library data as part of innovation management process had been proposed and implemented. In order to create the conceptual model, several disciplines such as human computer interaction, trend detection methods, user centered design, user experience and innovation management have been researched upon. In addition, evaluation of various information visualization tools for digital libraries has been carried out in order to find out and address the challenges faced by these tools. The conceptual model proposed in this thesis, combines the usage of semantic data with information visualization process and also follows structured innovation management process, in order to ensure that the concept and implementation (proof of concept) are valid, usable and valuable to the user.

Global Strategic Alliance

04/11/2018/in Allgemein, h_da, News, Research, Teaching, Workshop /by Kawa Nazemi

Professor Nazemi represented the Research Group on Human-Computer Interaction and Visual Analytics at the first “Global Strategic Alliance” hosted by the Coventry University. The fruitful discussions on various topics led to new research networks and potential research topics. Attendees were from the Coventry University, Purdue University, Dublin Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin Stout, Lucerne University of Applied Science and Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. For impressions and discussions see here. Where: Coventry University, UK When: 22. and 23. October 2018

Thesis Presentation: Automated User Evaluation Analysis for a Simplified and Continuous Software Development

24/06/2018/in SmartEval, Teaching, Thesis, TU Darmstadt /by Dirk Burkhardt

When: 26/06/2018 16:00 Where: Frauhofer IGD, Fraunhoferstr. 5, Room 324 Who: Akshay Madhav Deshmukh (Author), Dipl.-Inf. Dirk Burkhardt (Coordinator/Co-Supervisor), Prof. Dr. Arjan Kuijper (Supervisor) What: Master Thesis – “Automated User Evaluation Analysis for a Simplified and Continuous Software Development” Abstract: In today’s world, computers are tightly coupled with the internet and play a vital role in the development of business and various aspects of human lives. Hence, developing a quality user-computer interface has become a major challenge. Well-designed programs that are easily usable by users are moulded through a regress development life cycle. To ensure a user friendly interface, the interface has to be well designed and need to support smart interaction features. User interface can become an Archilles heel in a developed system because of the simple design mistakes which causes critical interaction problems which eventually leads to massive loss of attractiveness in the system. To overcome this problem, regular and consistent user evaluations have to be carried out to ensure the usability of the system. The importance of an evaluation for the development of a system is well known. Most of the today’s existing approaches necessitate the users to carry out an evaluation in a laboratory. Evaluators are compelled to dedicate the time in informing the participants about the evaluation process and providing a clear understanding of the questionnaires during the experiment. At the post experiment phase, evaluators have to invest a huge amount of time in generating a result report. On the whole, most of the today’s existing evaluation approaches hogs up too much of time for most developments. The main aim of this thesis is to develop an automated evaluation management and result analysis, based on a previous developed web-based evaluation system, which enables to elaborate the evaluation results and identify required changes on the developed system. The major idea is that an evaluation can be prepared once and repeated in regular time intervals with different user groups. The automated evaluation result analysis allows to easily check if the continued development lead to better results and if a bunch of given task could be better solved e.g. by added new functions or through enhanced presentation. Within the scope of this work, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) was researched, in particular towards User-Centered Design (UCD) and User Evaluation. Different approaches for an evaluation were researched in particular towards an evaluation through expert analysis and user participation. Existing evaluation strategies and solutions, inclined towards distributed evaluations in the form of practical as well as survey based evaluation methods were researched. A proof of concept of an automated evaluation result analysis that enables an easy detection of gaps and improvements in the system was implemented. Finally, the results of the research project Smarter Privacy were compared with the manual performed evaluation.

Summer School: From Smart to Intelligent Cities – Concepts, Methods, Digital Transformation

18/06/2018/in Lecture, Practical Experience, Teaching /by Dirk Burkhardt

At the EFST Summer School 2018 (from 18th to 22nd of June) on the University of Split Prof. Nazemi gives lectures on “Intelligent Visualizations in Future Policy Modelling” and “Data Analysis for eGovernance and eParticipation”. The lectures are a summary of current researches in this field as well as gained results in national and European research project on e-Government actions for Cities. The concepts of Smart and Intelligent Cities constitute a breakthrough in contemporary urban development and management. The Smart City notion has gained much popularity in the past years, but recently also the concept of Intelligent City – base on cognitive, learning and knowledge principles – has become en vogue. They prompted not also many debates but also many urban planning initiatives informed and influenced by rapid development of smart technologies and growing interest in digital transformation of public services. By presenting the most prominent challenges of these concepts and enabling technologies, participants will get an opportunity to understand and contribute to the challenges faced by modern cities and to explore more efficient solutions resulting from swift technology development and digital transformation initiatives in this specific context. The Summer School offers a unique opportunity to learn and discuss about structures, actors, processes and challenges of regional and urban development and management in dialogue with international academic experts and practitioners. This will be achieved through lectures from leading academics and experts in the field. The program can be downloaded here.

Lecturing within Workshop on User-oriented process (re)design and information systems modelling – a case of smart city services

10/06/2018/in Lecture, Research, Scitics, Workshop /by Dirk Burkhardt

In time from 18^th to 19^th of June 2018 the Faculty of Economics, Business and Tourism of the University of Split (Croatia) initiate a project workshop on “User-oriented process (re)design and information systems modelling – a case of smart city services”. The scientific community discusses about benefits and challenge in using modern technology in smart cities. As lecturer Prof. Dr. Nazemi was invited to contribute about Data Mining and Visual Analytics in smart city administrations, among other, to consider citizens opinions and ideas in governance processes. More information to the Project: http://smartcity.efst.hr

Talk about Intelligent Visualization on GI Rhein-Main (Society for Informatics)

15/05/2018/in Allgemein, Demo, h_da, News, Prototype, Research, Talk, Teaching, Technology /by Kawa Nazemi

Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi gave a talk on Intelligent Visualization and Visual Analytics on the regional meeting of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (Society for Informatics). In his talk he outlined the main purposes and future directions of Information Visualization, Visual Analytics and Intelligent Visualizations. The talk was given in German. Further information about the talk can be found here.