CS237 Project Idea List

These ideas, most less-than-completely-formed-and-described, were suggested by various researchers around campus. If you are interested in following them up for your project, please contact the provider of the idea or chat with me (dhl) for more information.

From Bill_Warren@brown.edu, Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences

Two possibilities come to mind:

(1) Creating a virtual environment. This isn't exactly data visualization, but we're doing experiments on human navigation ("cognitive maps") in VR, using the 40 x 40 ft. VENLab with an HMD, tracker, and SGI graphics. It may be possible for a group to create a virtual environment for such an experiment. For example, we're beginning to build a "Hundred acre wood" environment, and pieces of that may be doable. We use WorldToolKit as a platform, so there would be a learning curve involved.

(2) Prism views. A smaller project is to simulate what the world looks like through a distorting prism. This would involve learning a bit of optics (e.g. the transfer function for a wedge prism) and computing the view through it for a moving observer. My interest is in calculating and displaying the optic flow field (a vector field) for different environmentals structures with different types of distortions.

From David Laidlaw (dhl@cs) Computer Science

I'll describe a number of possible areas from which projects could be defined. In almost all of the areas below, initial steps have been taken to get needed data and to scope out a larger research agenda.

Evaluate, via a user study, how various kinds of textures can be used to encode multi-valued data.

Something motivated by one of the research proposals we have read (or one that we haven't read):

Develop anatomical visualization for brain tumor pre-surgical planning.

Evaluate whether visualizing neural diffusion rate information is useful.

Build physical prototypes for true 3D visualization.

Represent uncertainty visually.

From Stephen_Gatesy@Brown.edu, Evolutionary Biology

The best idea that I could come up with for a short project involved visualizing joint position (angle) and rotation (speed and direction of angular change) in my pigeon animations.

I'm looking for ways to show viewers what's happening at a joint (say the elbow) without plotting elbow angle vs time in a regular graph. I'd prefer to show a viewer the pigeon skeleton in a 3/4 perspective view, but have more specific data available as the wings are flapping.

My preliminary ideas involved coloring the bones around the joint according to angle (some sort of spectrum) or to velocity (perhaps like a Doppler shift?). I want to avoid clutter, so adding extra icons, vectors, etc. are less welcomed than something that will fit into the existing geometry of the model.

In the end I envision a skeletal model with real movement, within which a viewer can access more detailed data if they wish. Patterns of motion among joints might be more visible, but not so glaring as to be distracting from the wingbeat itself. I'm also hoping that each frame, if viewed as a still, could portray the motion in progress, not just a static position.

From Mijail_Serruya@Brown.edu and John_Donoghue@Brown.edu, Neuroscience

We are recording neural signals from patients that want to be able to control prosthetic devices. We would like to experiment with what patients are able to learn to do with these signals when they are used to drive various output "devices." For example, we might have the signal position the cursor on a computer scrieen continuously and/or produce other inputs, like mouse clicks or keyboard events.

From Peter_Richardson@Brown.edu, Engineering

Residence time is a term that describes how long fluid stays near a particular location. Reaction with a blood vessel wall (i.e. with the endothelial cells that cover it) may be affected by the spatial distribution of residence times for particles carried in the flow. How can this be visualized to help pathologists and pharmacologists make comparisons with local effects at vessel walls visualized with stains, or labelled biochemical probes?

From Ben Greenberg, bdg@butler.org, Nuerosurgery

Put diffusion and structural MRI representations together. For transcranial magnetic stimulation research, you'd ultimately want simultaneous representations of brain structure, connectivity, intensity-dependent imposed magnetic fields, and ideally, EEG or evoked potentials as they change intensity and location over milliseconds post stimulation. Could the scale of the events visualized also change (from cellular to local network to multiple large networks?) [this one is also related to the pre-operative surgery idea -- David]

Can an application for exposure therapy for patients with specific kinds of phobias (flying, heights, contamination, crowds) be made more interactive (never seen a Cave, but that seems to be the idea), so that the intensity of exposure and the virtual environments presented could be varied to get progressively worse. Some such VR systems already exist, but I don't think they're that sophisticated. A really good one could be marketed.

From Terry_Tullis@brown.edu, Geology

Here are a couple of possible project ideas. They are all related to looking at earthquake simulation results.

1) I have a phigs program that displays earthquake simulation results along a fault in 3D. Converting this to a world toolkit (WTK) program and comparing effectiveness in various 3D environments would be useful.

2) The current display of information along a fault is limited to a single scalar value at each point of the fault surface. Extend that display to include more variables simultaneously.

3) Display time-variation of data on the fault surface, perhaps using time as a third dimension to create a volume.

Run different numerical simulations on a fault and compare the results visually to understand the limitations of the various methods and the significance of the differences

From David_Mumford@Brown.edu, Applied Math

Are you teaching anything about tools for seeking structure in high dimensional data sets, i.e. given a billion points in 10-dimensional space, figuring out if they lie, more or less, on some curved surface in R^10? I know there has been some work on this, but I'm not too familiar with it. If so, I might have a project.

The motivating problem for me is to "look" at 4x4 patches of images and classify them. A 4x4 patch is given by 16 pixels so defines a point in R^16. We can easily generate gigabytes of such patches, hence pts in R^16. But a gigabyte is still small compared to the elbow room in R^16. We have, of course, some ideas about what the cloud of these samples looks like but nothing really good yet.

From Michael_Tarr@brown.edu, Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences:

1. Visualization of similarity spaces: Take a set of images. Compute similarity over some metric. Generate visual representation of the space. Have sliders to change parameters, e.g., spatial filtering of image (might get more or less similar). And so on.

2. Visualization of brain imaging data collected longitudinally. We have time-series data across multiple slices in the brain. In addition we have behavioral data associated with the slices. Again, an interactive visualization tool would be very useful.

From George_Karniadakis@brown.edu

Perhaps you can incorporate ideas about mesh generation and quality inspection in the Cave. One can color elements according to Jacobians, move nodes by hand, etc.

From Gregory Jay, GJay@Lifespan.org, Rhode Island Hospital Orthopaedics

A project for those interested in modeling problems in biomedical engineering....Consider pulsus paradoxus, which is the decrease in blood pressure with inspiration. This is a pathological vital sign which is very important in evaluating patents wth asthma, croup, pneumothorax and pericardial tamponade. An overly simplified representation of blood pressure could be a sine wave. Imagine superimposed on that signal is the sine function with something like .5Sinf/4 which means that there is a periodic decrease in amplitude at a smaller frequency (ie respiration). In reality the blood pressure waveform is more complex than this. Modeling and analysis of real blood pressure waveforms could be accomplished with fast orthogonal search which provides an approximation to the Fourier transform. I am also ineterested in determining a molecular model for the molecule I am studying. I would like to talk to you about this va email to determine your interest. It is a big molecule- a polyprotein with up to 12 distinct regions. All included the mw would be up to 400 kDa. It is also glycosylated. I last looked into this challenge 2 years ago. At that time the modeing software would only be able to handle a piece at a time and without the sugars. I don't know what is available presently and how this field has advanced.

From John_Hermance@brown.edu, Geology

Visualize earth's magnetic field as it varies over time.

Visualize ground water dynamics.

From Tom Banchoff (tfb@cs) Mathematics

Create an interactive Cave application for interacting with mathematical surfaces in four dimensions. Evaluate whether the environment helps students in Math 8 understand the surfaces better.

From Anne Spalter, Computer Science (ams@cs, x3-7615)

I have a number of ideas about projects having to do with color color. The main goal of the project is to make it easier and more enjoyable to choose effective colors in computer graphics programs. Specific research underway includes:

1. Better interfaces for choosing and modifying colors in graphics applications

2. Designing expert palettes and their interfaces

3. Color palette organization

4. Visualization of color spaces

Here's a more specific project idea:

The Problem: The effects of different combinations of colors can be somewhat successfully described and predicted by color theory but 1. there are many dissenting opinions and 2. the theory tends to breakdown for real-life compositions (that have more than 2-5 colors in simple juxtaposed shapes).

A possible solution using visualization techniques: If the preferences for complex color interactions could be more easily studied, a theory of such interactions could possibly be developed. We propose plotting color-averaged areas of famous works (so that the preference factor is widely agreed upon) in a five-dimensional space -- RGB or HSV and x and y -- and looking for clusters. One of the chief challenges would be finding such clusters (if they exist) in a higher dimensional space. Some of it could be done analytically but we'd like to have a visual means of exploration too.

A possible solution using computational modeling: For the mathematically inclined, it is possible to model an image by dividing it into a n x n color-averaged area grid and think about each color area as one location in an n x n-dimensional space. One would plot many images this way and then rate them on a preference scale. Each image is then expressed as a long equation in which each location is a variable and has a co-efficient. Using the preference results, one can solve a huge set of simultaneous equations to solve for the co-efficients.

David Laidlaw
Last modified: Fri Apr 12 14:41:22 EDT 2002