Three data visualization blogs

A friend of mine passed me three nice sites/blogs about data visualization. One of them focuses on the aestetics of information: infostetics, which leads to the following beautiful video:

• http://infosthetics.com/
• http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
• http://flowingdata.com/
  

Visualisation of the European Airspace

Stumbled across a video visualising the disruption caused by the volcanic ash cloud in the northern European Airspace.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

PET-CT.zip

Here is another copy of PET-CT.zip

Better late than never

Looks like I've managed to completely neglect this blog. My name is Victor Wåhlström. I'm a 23 years old, fourth year student, studying Computer Science, with a focus on HCI, at KTH.

My main area of interest is computer graphics and game development, which has guided my choice of courses for the past two years. I signed up for this course with the hopes that it would complement and expand my current knowledge in new and useful directions, and I must say that thus far it seems to be doing a great job!

World Bank opens up statistics!

The World Bank have released their substantial statistics about the state of the world to use for free.

Awesome!

Cool data for visualizations to be found here for sure:

http://data.worldbank.org/

TED Talks: Hans Rosling

Thought I would share this great TED Talk, from 2006, with Hans Rosling. Note how well the data is visualized.

Earth visualization

Nasa has done some interesting (and open source) visualizations of the earth, including beautiful information visualization. http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/demos/

Visualization in realtime computer art

As a fan of the demoscene, I would like to suggest watching a few examples of applied visualization in this artform. Demos are short real-time animations often utilizing advanced graphics and algorithms, and often procedural based content. For example, the 4 kb (yes four kilo-byte) intro Elevated shows an beautiful generated landscape. To squeeze a whole accelerated 3D graphics and audio application into 4kb, certain tricks has to be applied, as can be described in this linux-based tutorial. In the demos "1995" and Life Force, one can see example of rendering of actual medical images, in the form of a brain and a heart respectively. The algorithm Marching cubes that you learn in this course is another example of an utilized algorithm, in this case for the popular effect Metaballs.

Mentioned Demos/intros:
- Elevated (video) (more info and download)
- Life Force (video) (more info and download)
- 1995 (video above) (video) (more info and download)

Presentations

Great to read the presentations of the course participants on this blog. We would like to encourage everyone to write a paragraph of where they come from and study, and what expectations you have of the course.

To not be worse myself, I can add that I am a part time research engineer at the Human-Computer Interaction department, 26 years, grow up on Gotland, and I have a MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from KTH since 2008 (I'm a D-02). I also run a spinn-off company making open source based haptic feedback enabled surgical simulators.

Lab1 - tips about unu project

In Lab1 part you're supposed to use the command
./unu project
but me and my labpartner didn't think that the description that was given in the lab instructions and by unu was clear about the usage. We found this website that gives you a good explanation.

Creaform 3D scanners

I found this interesting video demoing the handheld 3D-scanner created by Creaform. It's not a method of direct visualization but rather a method of gathering information for the visualization. They show off a whole bunch of different fields for which this technology is applicable and how the information can be visualized in those fields, enjoy!

Teem and unu

Where did this "unu" command come from that was included in the lab? It is part of a packaged called "teem", http://teem.sourceforge.net/, which is quite powerful while being command line based. This has the benefit of for example enable creation of a visualization pipeline, using unix pipes (or just executing commands step by step). Check out their rendering demos!

Ida

My name is Ida Johansson and i´m 25 years of age. I´ve been studying at KTH since january 2009 within Media technology. Before I´ve studied Media Technology at University of Linköping, campus Norrköping for 3 years. I have a background in design and I recieved my Diploma of Graphic Design in 2005 at Martin College, Australia. I´m looking forward to do this course, I´ve heard so much about it. Good things of course!

Fifth and not last

My name is Martin Björkman, I am 23 years old and I am born and raised in Stockholm. This is my fourth year at Computer Science here at KTH and I am a HCI major. My main focus is computer graphics, both in and out of school, and this is the main reason for me attending this course. The expectations I have in regard to this course are mainly focused on non-scientific-visualization, for which reason I hope to learn a lot of new and exciting techniques.

See you in class!

1,2,3,4!

I’m Marcus Tröjbom, 23 years old from Stockholm and in my fourth year of studies at KTH Computer Science. For the last two years, center of attention has been on human-computer interaction. So this is my third course with Lasse. I’m very thrilled about this course and have great expectations to learn several new techniques (I’ve never used ParaView e.i.) for visualization however mostly interested in non-scientific visualizations.

Cheers!

Third!

Hello everyone!

Rikard Åslund behind the keyboard, 23 year old guy from a suburb to Stockholm, Sweden. I'm currently at my forth year here at KTH and are looking forward to doing my thesis this autumn. I'm studying Computer Science with focus on HCI and have recently developed a special interest for visualization, that is in my view a extremely useful and powerful subject, that sadly often gets forgotten. Next to my studies I run a company (since a couple of years) that works mainly with web and servers.

My expectations of the course is that it will teach me tools and methods to visualize both scientific data in a program like ParaView (that I have come across before) and more non-scientific visualizations that are meant for a more non-scientific audience. Simply said, I hope that after this course I will have greatly developed my skills in the area of visualization.

Over and out!

Hi there!

I'm Yazid Al-Hassan, 29 years old from Jordan. I have been awarded a scholarship within the Guest Scholarship Program from the Swedish Institute for studying the master program in Mathematics (Computational mathematics) at KTH.

I have been a lecturer in the Ministry of Education for 6 years. Currently, I am interested in two topics:

1. Mathematical statistics, especially in Ridge Regression. I have published three articles concerning this topic, in the last one I have proposed a new Ridge estimator. Nowadays, I am working on evaluating the performance of some new techniques in Ridge Regression and making an improvement using eigen-analysis.

2. Numerical solution of PDE. This will be my master thesis subject (Hopefully!!)

I have registered in this course to learn new techniques that would help me to present different types of data as good as possible. The first lecture today has given me a good indication of what will be next.

I hope I will be satisfied at the end of this course.

Cheers:-)

Someone's got to be first? =)

Hi there!

I'm Mikael Andersson, 24 years old from Stockholm, Sweden. I study Industrial Engineering and Management - currently in the final year. My interests are mainly in entrepreneurship and technology (technology for the bottom of the pyramid, ICT and other awesome stuff). I run a startup developing solar powered refrigerators for developing countries and I am also pursuing a new venture to bring visualization tools to the finance industry. As a sidenote: I love China and speak some chinese (in the context of taxis and restaurants at least).

Please edit this post and fill out your info.

Welcome to the course - slides

The slides from the first lecture can now be found on the webpage:
http://www.csc.kth.se/utbildning/kth/kurser/DD2257/visual10/

Use the blog to present your background and expectations.

Course started today

The course started with lecture by Lars Kjelldahl 10.15 Thursday the 25th of March 2010