CMSC 838f: Information Visualization

Grading, Presentations, Application and Project

Final Grade:
Paper presentations: 10%, Application: 10%,  Mid-term exam: 15%, Term Team Project: 25%, Class participation: 5%, Final take-home exam: 35%
Master's Comprehensive:
Application + Mid-term exam
Paper Presentations:
We will read through the papers in the book Using Vision to Think. Everyone should read the 20+ assigned papers (and as much as they can of the related papers in the same section. In particular the sections' introductions provide nice overviews). Paper presentations will be prepared individually. Well-rehearsed presentations will be made in class using PowerPoint (approx 15 minutes + 15 minutes discussion), and posted to the class website. Your presentation should contain slides with at least these titles and content:
  1. Description of the paper
    Where possible show demos or several screen shots
  2. My favorite sentence
  3. Contributions
  4. Notes on the references
  5. Critique — strengths and weaknesses
  6. What has happened to this topic?
Application:
Find information to visualize with an existing tool, such as Spotfire, Treemap2000, or Jazz to explore and present the information.  See the tools page for suggestions. Candidate information sources include:
  1. Industry data (e.g. Chevron production data)
  2. US Census data
  3. Non confidential personal data (i.e. your personal history)
  4. or find any other real data from friends and relatives
Class presentations should show the information visualization, point out the interesting features of the data, and critique the tool. A 300-600 word write up, posted to the class website, should describe the information and annotate the interesting features in the 3-6 screen grabs.
[Note: you can see examples from 838s-Fall99.]
Term Team Project:
Your term project is done in teams of 2 people and should produce a conference quality paper that applies an existing visualization tool in depth for a real world client or develops a new tool. The paper should be eight pages, two column format (10 pt Times New Roman) with illustrations, references.
[Note: you can see examples from 838s-Fall99.]