Computer Science Ethics Seminar

Visual Analytics for Big Video Visualization

When: Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Where: PGH 232
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Speaker: Robert S. Laramee, Swansea University

Host: Prof. Guoning Chen

With advancements in multimedia and data storage technologies and the ever-decreasing costs of hardware, our ability to generate and store evermore video and other multimedia data is unprecedented.  YouTube, for example, has over 1 billion users.  However, a very large gap remains between our ability to generate and store large collections of complex, time-dependent video and multimedia data and our ability to derive useful information and knowledge from it.  Viewing video and multimedia as a data source, visual analytics exploits our most powerful sense, vision, in order to derive information, knowledge and gain insight into big multimedia data sets that record complicated and often time-dependent events.  This talk presents a case study of state-of-the art visualization and visual analytics techniques applied to video multimedia in order to explore, analyze, and present video data.  In this case, we show how glyph-based visualization can be used to convey the most important information and events from videos of rugby games.  The talk showcases some of visualizations strengths, weaknesses, and, goals.  We describe inter-disciplinary case-study based on rugby sports analytics, where visual analytics and visualization is used to address fundamental questions-the answers of which we hope to discover in various large, complex, and time-dependent multimedia data.

Bio:

Robert S. Laramee received a bachelor’s degree in physics, cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  He received a masters degree in computer science from the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He was awarded a PhD from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms in 2005. From 2001 to 2006 he was a researcher at the VRVis Research Center and a software engineer at AVL in the department of Advanced Simulation Technologies. Currently he is an Associate Professor at the Swansea University, Wales in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests are in the areas of scientific visualization, information visualization, and visual analytics. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals and conferences.