Simon@iSchool

My projects for the semester have been archived on my personal site:

http://sybak.com/

For each of the projects mentioned so far:

• Physical Battleship
• Nominal Color Encoding Generator (a.k.a. Palette Assistant)
• Map of the Internet

… optimized versions have been uploaded along with their source code. To see their source code, simply load them, right-click on the Flash player area, and choose “View source”.

That’s it for this semester; I’m beat. Tune in next semester for more adventures (though not necessarily at the iSchool!).

A final paper for Visualization was written in the SIGGRAPH conference proceedings format. It can be accessed here:

http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-10-fa08/wiki/images/6/66/FP-STCAKY-paper.pdf

The paper’s abstract is as follows:

Encoding data using color is a key technique employed by almost all visualizations. A set of colors used to represent data values must be carefully chosen in order to maximize the effectiveness of the visualization in which it is used. We present a method of automatically generating effective color palettes for nominal data encoding based on user specifications. We apply simulated annealing with an appropriate heuristic function to find palettes that have visually distinguishable colors and adhere closely to a user’s color preferences. Such palettes can be customized to feature color harmony, a particular variation of contrast or saturation, or support for the colorblind.

The paper features a detailed treatment of our method as well as an analysis of the palettes generated.

We also provide a working implementation of our color palette generation system as well as the source, available off a new redirection link:

http://sybak.com/NCEG

That stands for “Nominal Color Encoding Generator” – the length of our topic has always been an issue…

The work on Color Palette Generation for Nominal Encodings is complete, and a poster presentation was held on this day.

Our poster in PDF format can be accessed here:

http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-10-fa08/wiki/images/5/5c/FP-STCAKY-poster.pdf

Note the subtle use of the BiD poster template. =P

We are at the halfway point with our Visualization final project.

Status:

• Heuristic/evaluation function: Currently involves contrast, closeness of neighboring values
• Simulated Annealing: Implemented and functional with placeholder functions
• User Interface: Overall look mostly implemented

For details and some screenshots of the work-in-progress, please see our midpoint presentation:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dgzj35md_30d2z732hg

The final project for Visualization is set. We are going to try to use simulated annealing (with a heuristic based on Brewer’s Color Use Guidelines) to algorithmically generate original, high-quality color palettes for use as nominal encodings in visualizations.

It’s quite a mouthful, but our documents should make this more clear.

Track our proposal and progress on our official course website:
http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-10-fa08/wiki/index.php/FP-SimonTan-CalvinArdi-KetrinaYim

See our first project proposal presentation:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dgzj35md_23g2tp2ff5&hl=en