Category Archives: University of Victoria

InfoTypography work being presented at SIGGRAPH this week

This week I will be presenting at ACM SIGGRAPH (the top conference in graphics and one of the most prestigious in Computer Science) the work that Johannes Lang and I have done in Infotypography. We looked at how people perceive typographic parameters. This could support the use of these parameters to represent information.

Here is a teaser of the talk (30 seconds):

Here is a fuller, 15 min presentation ():

Here are two links to the paper:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530111
Local copy

Here is a website with resources for using it:
https://nacenta.com/infotypography

For those of you who are in Vancouver attending SIGGRAPH, the presentation is:

When: Thursday August 11, 2022
Where: East Building, Ballroom C
Session: Perception

How do people think about Constraint Problems?

A paper on our work about how people think about constraint programming has just been published in anticipation of the prestigious Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2022). The paper is accessible through this address.

The work takes place at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Constraint Programming.

We analyzed how non-experts tried to solve constrained programming problems.

Image showing a few examples of how people solved common constraint programming problems, such as scheduling.

This is work with Ruth Hoffmann, Xu Zhu, and Özgür Akgün, from the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews (my previous main institution).

This follows our previous work on how people visually represent discrete contraint problems (at the IEEE Transations on Visualization and Computer Graphics).

Dr Hoffmann has also presented at ModRef a synthesis on both pieces of work.

Finally, the SACHI group posted a blog post with a bit more information.

Student Paper on Representations and Transformations

Adam Binks (A PhD Student at the University of St Andrews) and myself (Miguel Nacenta) just published an article in the International Journal of Human Computer Studies) about our recent research.

Adam built a new tool to support people when transforming complex networks of thoughts and ideas into text prose. The tool itself (called Write Reason) and a short description of what we found when we studied essay writers using the tool is accessible through the WriteReason site.

One of the most interesting things about our findings is that there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in between the creation of different representations of the ideas. In other words, transformations between representations are much more complex, interesting and important than we thought before.

This post is also in the VIXI website.

St Andrews + UVic PhD Scholarship on Machine Learning and Visualization

We are advertising a unique cross-continental opportunity to carry out cutting-edge research on Machine Learning and Information Visualization across two continents at two leading institutions, the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and the University of Victoria (Canada).

For administrative details, conditions and an initial description of the research see: the official Scholarship Announcement.

Supervision is collaborative between Dr Juan Ye and Uta Hinrichs (St Andrews) and myself (Miguel Nacenta–University of Victoria). Applications are accepted until June 30th, 2020. Feel free to drop me a line at nacenta at uvic dot ca if you want to discuss your application informally with me.