Open topics will be listed on the webpage. Please register in the initial meeting or through email (martin.haidacher#cg.tuwien.ac.at).

Online material

Written reports will be uploaded here (after the semester).

PowerPoint slides of the initial meeting.

Written reports from the winter semester

Some written reports from the winter semester 2010 are available. These can be used as a reference to structure your own paper.

General Information about the seminar

Goal of the seminar

The goal of this seminar is to conduct a sound literature review on a specific topic and present a state of the art report. A member of the teaching staff will guide and help students in acquiring the scientific material and structuring the report. A written report in the form of a scientific paper will be produced. The students are also expected to present their work in a 20 minutes talk during the semester. Topics for the seminar will be available in the initial meeting. Students have the option to work in groups of two.

Tasks for the students

Students are expected to fulfil certain requirements of the seminar. Teaching staff will evaluate and grade students based on the following output.
  • A list of literature, that a student intends to review is to be submitted within the first 14 days of the start of the seminar. Students are not expected to provide a comprehensive list. This document will be regarded as an official seminar registration of the student.
  • A written report in the form of a scientific paper. We strongly encourage that the reports are composed in LaTeX. The report must have a minimum of 8 written pages per student. Depending on the student and the supervisor, the prefered language is either German or English, with English as a preference.
  • It is mandatory to attend the lecture "Forschung und wie sie funktioniert" of Professor Eduard Gröller, the lecture "Wie halte ich einen Vortrag" of Professor Werner Purgathofer, and the lecture "Wie schreibt man eine wissenschaftliche Arbeit?" of Professor Michael Wimmer. You can ask for a waiver in case you have already attended one of these talks.
  • A 20 minutes presentation in English language followed by a 5 minutes discussion. A template for the PowerPoint presentation is provided in the Link's section. The slides are to be submitted to the teaching staff after the talk.
  • Active discussion participation is expected after the presentation of other students.

Plagiarism

All the literature that is reviewed during the seminar has to be placed in the reference section of the report. You can have further information about referencing here. We are all expected to abide by professional scientific ethics and make sure that the work is not plagiarized in any sense.

Important Dates

Grading Criteria

  • Written Report is worth 50% of the grade
  • Talk is worth 40% of the grade
  • Attendance during the talks is worth 5% of the grade
  • Active discussion participation is worth 5% of the grade

Topics

  • Glyph based visualization: One slot available
    Glyphs are used to visualize certain information such as the orientation of flow, pressure or temperature. There exist several types of different glyphs like arrows, ellipsoids or superquadrics. Each of them has its specific degrees of freedom or properties, onto which parameters, such as pressure or flow-orientation, can be mapped. Some glyphs might convey this information well in 2D and others might be more suitable for 3D. Additionally, some glyph properties might be perceive differently, which leads to the field of perception (pre-attentive stimuli vs. attentive stimuli).
  • Data Acquisition Modalities: Taken
    Data acquisition is a very important task. There exist several modalities that have different features and therefore are used in various application areas. Whereas one modality is usually solely used, there are possibilities to combine different modalities in order to utilize their advantages. Nowadays, scanners are pretty fast and the radiation dose has been decreased in order to not harm the patient's health. Some modalities might require some invasive procedure, such as CTA by injecting a contrast agent to enhance vessels.
  • From the Smallest to the Biggest: One slot available
    The visualization of the natural phenomena with scientific methods enables to experience the world that is otherwise limited to the human visual system. With the most advanced microscopes and telescopes we are able to experience the world around us that would be hidden to us otherwise. If we look at the world at different scales, organized by size and distance, we could build a scale. The goal of the project is to write a survey about visualizations that are made at those scale sorted from the smallest scale of picometer (scale of diameter of a gold atom) to the scale of objects in the universe (distance to Quasar). The survey should contain description of methods currently used in science (capturing, visual mapping, rendering) which should be accompanied with compelling images.
  • Intangible Human-Computer Interfaces in Visualization: One slot available
    Standard ways of controlling computers are nowadays supplemented with novel methods that include computer vision, voice recognition and artificial intelligence. For example, after Microsoft has released the Kinect to the market, first it got an attention of community of game developers and hackers, which was shortly joined by scientific audience from different fields, as well. That resulted into several of novel applications ranging from games to medicine. The goal of the project is to write a report about alternative interfaces that control interactive visualizations and so provide additional support to the user.
  • Uncertainty Visualization: One slot available
    Every measurement has some degree of uncertainty or error associated with it. In many cases it is small and can be neglected. However, recently uncertainty is of high interest in many areas. Uncertainty visualization is a challenging task, as it takes additional data dimension to be shown to the user. Many visualization techniques depicting uncertainty of the underlying data have been developed: showing uncertainties with volume rendering, using noise or textures, utilizing animations, or using point point-based surface representations.
  • Parameter Visualization: Taken
    Controlling algorithms behavior is done using many parameters. E.g., in engineering various simulations provide their outputs based on some physical parameters. Finding optimal parameters or exploring the sensitivity of the algorithm with respect to its parameters are important and elaborate tasks. The visual exploration is especially challenging as it often have to represent multi-dimensional data in the form that can be mentally perceived by humans. In this context parameter exploration systems are used. These systems are utilizing such techniques as parallel coordinates, scatter plots and set of 2D parameter space projections.
  • Computer Graphics on Mobile Devices: Taken
    In recent years the graphics hardware for mobile devices gets better and better. Therefore it is possible to run complex renderings and visualizations. The report about this topic should cover the various available graphics hardware for hardware (in tablets, mobile phones) as well as different APIs which are used from various platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, …) to implement the rendering pipeline.
  • Graph Visualization: Taken
    Data with tree- and graph-like structure are very common nowadays. For analysis of this kind of data it is crucial to be able to visualize it in a way that reveals areas of interest. This means not only to assign visual properties to individual vertices and edges, but also create appropriate layout of the graph elements in 2D or 3D space.
  • Procedural Content Generation: One slot available
    In the process of producing video games or movies it is sometimes necessary to create visual representations of objects which would be too laborious to be created manually by artists. This is when the procedural content generation comes into play. Procedural content generation is a set of techniques for creating large amount of various visual content, such as 3D models or textures, from small number of input parameters. It can be used to generate sceneries or even whole worlds for games and movies.

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Tips for Writing Papers and Preparing Presentations