Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Label Placement for Outliers in Scatterplots

In many application scenarios, outliers can be associated with speciﬁc importance for various reasons. In such cases, labeling outliers is important to connect them to the actual semantics of the respective entity. In this paper, we present a cost-based greedy approach that places labels with outliers within scatterplots. The approach uses a search strategy to ﬁnd the position that represents the least cost to place labels. Our approach can also produce different labeling outcomes by adjusting the weights of the criteria of the cost function. We demonstrate our approach with scatterplots produced from object-oriented software metrics, where outliers often relate to bad smells in the software.
Circular Part-to-Whole Charts Using the Area Visual Cue

Studies of chart types can reveal unexplored design spaces, like the circular diagrams used in recent studies on pie charts. In this paper, we explore several variations of part-to-whole charts that use area to represent a fraction within a circle. We ﬁnd one chart that performs very similarly to the pie chart, even though it is visually more complex. Centered shapes turn out to lead to much worse accuracy than any other stimuli, even the same shape when not centered. These ﬁrst results point to the need for more systematic explorations of the design spaces around existing charts.
Real-Time Gaze Mapping in Virtual Environments

In order to analyze an analyst’s behavior in an immersive environment, his or her eye movements can be monitored using eye trackers. Hereby, points of individual interest can be objectively identiﬁed, for instance, to assess the usability and intuitiveness of a framework. However, this technique can be used not only as a post-event analysis tool but also to assist an ongoing exploration of a virtual environment. With this poster, we present a technique that allows a real-time gaze map creation which supports the immersed analyst by providing real-time feedback on the user’s own activity. In our approach, all surfaces in the virtual environment are enwrapped with a mesh structure. The grid structure recognizes when a user drifts with his or her eyes above it and increments weights of activated node points. This allows highlighting areas that have been observed, but also those that have not been observed - also when they are occluded by other objects or surfaces. We tested our technique in a preliminary qualitative expert study and received helpful feedback for further improvements.
Visualizing Transportation Flows with Mode Split using Glyphs

The increasing trend of using unconventional data in urban planning environments has led to the need for developing systems that can visualize this data. Here we present a visualization for studying commuting ﬂows within a city, with a particular focus on the distribution of mode of transportation usage. Our design, called ModalCell, uses a glyph-based ﬂow map to show a city’s ﬂows considering mode split, direction, and distance range. We evaluate ModalCell with a pilot survey and a use case that shows the potential of the approach to make ﬂows within a city visible and understandable
SOAViz: Visualization for Portable X-ray Fluorescence Soil Profiles

The soil is an essential element of life. It is where people grow plants for food, ﬁbers, and other materials. It also helps to ﬁlter water and recycles wastes. Therefore, understanding soil physical/chemical characteristics and structural aggregation are of vital importance. In this project, we work closely with the soil scientists to develop a visualization solution to the rapidly gaining favor approach to soil horizon analysis using Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) devices. Our visualization, called SOAViz, aims to provide soil scientists with rapid valuable insights into soil properties both visually perceptible with graphs and imperceptible quantiﬁcation features with statistical calculations from the data collected from pXRF equipment. SOAViz was developed with analysis tasks solicited from the soil scientists and validated by applying to real soil proﬁles collected in an Experimental Rangeland in Lubbock, TX, USA. This visual solution together with the quick scanning results from pXRF devices offers a timely means of quantifying elemental concentrations in the soil horizons in large scale at a reduced cost.
Audio-Visual Multiple-Speaker Tracking for Robot Perception. (Suivi multi-locuteurs avec des informations audio-visuelles pour la perception des robots)

Robot perception plays a crucial role in human-robot interaction (HRI). The perception system provides the robot with information of the surroundings and enables it to interact with people. In a conversational scenario, a group of people may chat in front of the robot and move freely. In such situations, robots are expected to understand where the people are, who is speaking, or what they are talking about. This thesis concentrates on answering the first two questions, namely speaker tracking and diarization. To that end, we use different modalities of the robot’s perception system. Similar to seeing and hearing for humans, audio and visual information are critical cues for robots in a conversational scenario. Advancements in computer vision and audio processing in the last decade revolutionized robot perception abilities and enabled us to build joint audio-visual applications. In this thesis, we present the following contributions: we first develop a variational Bayesian framework for tracking multiple objects. The variational Bayesian framework provides closed-form tractable problem solutions, enabling an efficient tracking process. The framework is first applied to visual multiple-person tracking. The birth and death processes are built jointly to deal with the varying number of people in the scene. We then augment the framework by exploiting the complementarity of vision and robot motor information. On the one hand, the robot’s active motion can be integrated into the visual tracking system to stabilize the tracking. On the other hand, visual information can be used to perform motor servoing. As a next step we combine audio and visual information in the framework and exploit the association between the acoustic feature frequency bins with tracked people, to estimate the smooth trajectories of people, and to infer their acoustic status (i.e. speaking or silent). To adapt the framework to applications with no vision information, we employ it to acoustic-only speaker localization and tracking. Online dereverberation techniques are first applied then followed by the tracking system. Finally, we propose a variant of the acoustic-only tracking model based on the von-Mises distribution, which is specifically adapted to directional data. All proposed methods are validated on datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively.
ReLVis: Visual Analytics for Situational Awareness During Reinforcement Learning Experimentation

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning where an agent learns to maximize reward through trial and error. RL is challenging and data/compute intensive leading practitioners to become overwhelmed and make poor modeling decisions. Our contribution is a Visual Analytics tool designed to help data scientists maintain situation awareness during RL experimentation. Our tool allows users to understand which hyper-parameter values lead to better or worse outcomes, what behaviors are associated with high and low reward, and how behaviors evolve throughout training. We evaluated our tool through three uses cases using state of the art deep RL models demonstrating how our tool leads to RL situation awareness
Network architectures and energy efficiency for high performance data centers. (Architectures réseaux et optimisation d'énergie pour les centres de données massives)

The increasing trend to migrate applications, computation and storage into more robust systems leads to the emergence of mega data centers hosting tens of thousands of servers. As a result, designing a data center network that interconnects this massive number of servers, and providing efficient and fault-tolerant routing service are becoming an urgent need and a challenge that will be addressed in this thesis. Since this is a hot research topic, many solutions are proposed like adapting new interconnection technologies and new algorithms for data centers. However, many of these solutions generally suffer from performance problems, or can be quite costly. In addition, devoted efforts have not focused on quality of service and power efficiency on data center networks. So, in order to provide a novel solution that challenges the drawbacks of other researches and involves their advantages, we propose to develop new data center interconnection networks that aim to build a scalable, cost-effective, high performant and QoS-capable networking infrastructure. In addition, we suggest to implement power aware algorithms to make the network energy effective. Hence, we will particularly investigate the following issues: 1) Fixing architectural and topological properties of the new proposed data centers and evaluating their performances and capacities of providing robust systems under a faulty environment. 2) Proposing routing, load-balancing, fault-tolerance and power efficient algorithms to apply on our architectures and examining their complexity and how they satisfy the system requirements. 3) Integrating quality of service. 4) Comparing our proposed data centers and algorithms to existing solutions under a realistic environment. In this thesis, we investigate a quite challenging topic where we intend, first, to study the existing models, propose improvements and suggest new methodologies and algorithms.
Integration of TicToc Concurrency Control Protocol with Parallel Write Ahead Logging Protocol

A transactional system consists of a concurrency control system and a recovery system. TicToc is one of the state of the art concurrency control protocols today, but it lacks recovery system. We studied the ways to integrate TicToc and recovery system. For efficiency, we adopted a parallel write ahead logging scheme for the recovery system. There are two methods to optimize the logging. First method is early lock release which executes lock release early on data objects. Second method is group commit which executes batched logs transfer to storage from memory. We integrated a transactional system consisted by TicToc and P-WAL logging system assuming non-volatile memory. We found that the two optimization methods incur performance degradation when storage access latency is equivalent to that of NVRAM.
The Human User in Progressive Visual Analytics

The amount of generated and analyzed data is ever increasing, and processing such large data sets can take too long in situations where time-to-decision or ﬂuid data exploration are critical. Progressive visual analytics (PVA) has recently emerged as a potential solution that allows users to analyze intermediary results during the computation without waiting for the computation to complete. However, there has been limited consideration on how these techniques impact the user. Based on discussions from a Dagstuhl seminar held in October 2018, this paper characterizes PVA users by their common roles, their main tasks, and their distinct focus of analysis. It further discusses cognitive biases that play a particular role in PVA. This work will help PVA visualization designers in devising systems that are tailored for their speciﬁc target users and their characteristics.
A Study on Reflecting User's Emotions Using a Painterly Rendering System

Painters express visual experience in paintings through their own form of artistic expression and viewers feel various emotions about the elements appearing in paintings. However, it is very difﬁcult for non-experts to express their emotions in painting by using painting elements as painters do. Thus, we aim to help users to express their feelings by improving their understanding of painting elements. To do this, we created a variety of paintings based on elements using a painterly rendering system with painting features. Then, the relationship between painting elements and emotions was examined through the study of users. We present a method of generating a painting expressing a specific emotion by applying elements according to certain emotional values.
Evaluation of the virtual reality usage for the promotion of historical heritage. (Evaluation de l'usage de la réalité virtuelle pour la promotion de patrimoine historique)

Les applications de patrimoine numerique ont ete largement developpees grâce aux techniques de realite virtuelle, egalement appelees Virtual Museum (VM). Les appareils et les contenus numeriques augmentent considerablement, ce qui permet le systeme d’interaction de faire immerger les utilisateurs dans la VM. Afin de developper une application interactive, une interaction est toujours definie avant la creation d'une application sur la plate-forme selectionnee. Cela depend du contenu et des appareils, ce qui est limite s’il y a le changement d'appareil. A l’heure actuelle, les technologies de la realite virtuelle evoluent rapidement. Une plate-forme de developpement d’application doit supporter l’evolution des peripheriques et optimiser les systemes d’interaction a utiliser dans les ordinateurs virtuels. Cependant, l'organisation des peripheriques et la structure du contenu sur une plate-forme ne font toujours pas l'objet d'une gestion efficace pour soutenir une interaction alternative en general.Nous avons propose une nouvelle methode pour developper une application de VM qui fournit un modele de narration numerique pour creer un contenu interactif et un systeme d’interaction adaptatif dans lequel une application est exportable dans n’importe quel appareil. Nous fournissons aux developpeurs des outils d’edition flexibles pour gerer la structure du contenu. L'utilisation des interactions sera interpretee dans une abstraction de haut niveau et executee sur un peripherique materiel de bas niveau ou les interactions ont ete adaptees. La narration specifie le comportement d'interaction qui peut conduire a une interaction dans une scene virtuelle, meme un peripherique peut etre commute. Notre systeme d'interaction adaptatif supporte l'identification des capacites des appareils et des attentes en matiere de narration qui pourraient etre selectionnees pour un systeme d'apprentissage efficace et pour ameliorer le niveau d'immersion. Cette mise en œuvre est utile a deployer non seulement pour le developpement d'applications de patrimoine numerique, mais egalement pour l'ingenierie industrielle ou un contenu interactif et un travail collaboratif sont necessaires.
Visual Analysis of Aluminum Production Data with Tightly Linked Views

Monitoring, analyzing and determining the production quality in a complex and long-running process such as in the aluminum production is a challenging task. We aim to support production data exploration in the aluminum industry. To this end, we developed the ﬁrst version of the interactive visual analytics tool ADAM. The main aspect of concern is product quality, which is obtained from the quality inspection of aluminum plates at the end of the production process. A set of tightly linked views of production parameters with cross-ﬁltering capability support the inspection of factors possibly inﬂuencing the product quality. ADAM allows highly responsive forward and backward search in the quality and production parameter space, leading to an understanding of important parameters, and supporting production planning and process improvement. Our approach was designed in an iterative development cycle guided by domain requirements from a major aluminum producer. We introduce the domain problem, propose a visual analytics design to support the problem, and demonstrate by application to real production data the usefulness and possible insights which can be obtained.
On Inconvenient Images: Exploring the Design Space of Engaging Climate Change Visualizations for Public Audiences

If there ever was a model theme for information visualization, climate change arguably checks all the boxes. Omnipresent and relevant, yet abstract and statistical by nature, as well as invisible for the naked eye – climate change is a subject matter in need for perception and cognition support par excellence. Consequently, a large number of data journalists and science communicators utilize visual representations of climate change data to provide (a) information, and to (b) raise consciousness and encourage behavioral adaptation. Multiple design strategies have been developed to make the complex (non-)phenomenon accessible for visual perception and reasoning of public audiences. Despite of its obvious societal relevance, the visualization community has not had a systematic look at this nascent application ﬁeld until now. With this paper we aim to close this gap and survey climate change visualizations to explore their design space. With speciﬁc regard to visualizations geared to inform non-expert users in the context of journalism and science communication, we analyze a sample of representations to document design choices and communication strategies, including options of persuasive and engaging design.
A unified approach to characterization of PWM and quasi-PWM switching converters: topological constraints, classification and synthesis

Topological constraints are obtained for PWM (pulse-width-modulated) (under both continuous and discontinuous current modes) and quasi-PWM (includes quasi-resonant and quasi-square-wave) converters by identifying their tree structures. The switching sequence of these converters and a classification of quasi-PWM convertors are presented. A dual circuit of an ideal diode and an ideal switch are proposed and used to obtain duals of the switching converters in one step. A procedure for the synthesis of quasi-PSM converters is presented. <<ETX>>
Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on High-performance reconfigurable computing technology and applications: held in conjunction with SC07

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the First International Workshop on High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing Technology and Applications (HPRCTA'07). High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (HPRC) based on the combination of conventional microprocessors and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) is a new and rapidly evolving computing paradigm that offers a potential to accelerate computationally intensive scientific applications beyond of what is possible on today's mainstream high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The academic community has been actively investigating this technology for the past several years and the technology has proven itself to be practical for a number of HPC applications. Many of the HPC vendors are now offering or are planning to offer various HPRC solutions. The goal of this workshop, co-located with the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC07), is to provide a forum for academic researchers and industry to discuss the latest trends and developments in the field, and to set a research agenda for the upcoming years on the use of field-programmable gate array technology in high performance computing. The workshop is co-organized and co-sponsored by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, OpenFPGA, and the NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). It consists of two academic sessions chaired by Tarek El-Ghazawi (The George Washington University) and Volodymyr Kindratenko (NCSA) and two special sessions: NSF CHREC panel chaired by Olaf Storaasli (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and Industry Panel chaired by Eric Stahlberg (OpenFPGA). We are very pleased to announce the keynote presentation by Nick Tredennick (Gilder Publishing) and an invited presentation by Reiner Hartenstein (Kaiserslautern University of Technology).
A Computer Comparison of Four Quadratic Programming Algorithms

This paper compares the computational performance of the quadratic programming algorithms of Dantzig, Beale, Wolfe and a modification of Wolfe's algorithm. Problems are generated and solved on the computer with iteration count serving as the principal method of comparison. The effect of certain problem parameters on rate of convergence is considered and computer time and storage requirements of the four algorithms are discussed.
Integrated Vehicle Control

The ever-increasing use of electronics and computers in our vehicles is apparent to everyone and many studies have clearly documented the dramatically increased electronic content in future vehicles. What's not so clear is how vehicle designers will take advantage of the increased possibilities represented by more electronics and computers to give the driver-vehicle system expanded capability and enhanced value to our customers. The essence of our work in Project Trilby is to create the concepts and bring together the technology for total, integrated control of our vehicles in order to provide our customers with a level of performance not otherwise achieveable. Total, integrated contro requires the coordination of all vehicle subsystems, while factoring the needs, performance and preferences of the driver into the design and control decisions. One possible scenario is an Adaptive Vehicle which would have: the capability for sensing or identifying its operational situation, an on-board knowledge or data base, the ability to analyze the situation relative to history and indicated driver preferences and performance capabilities, and then the ability to adapt the vehicle via control decisions to achieve the beat overall system performance. Worldwide, in the automotive industry and in other industries, there are similar efforts to capitalize on the continued maturing of computers and electronics, with the core question being the degree of intelligence and authority to be incorporated. The overall approach to design of such systems is dependent on: the use of analytical design techniques, including explicit representation of the driver, to understand configure the system; achieving coordinated control of the subsystems; and interfacing properly with the rapidly changing environment in which our vehicles must operate.
Design and implementation of multi-user wireless body sensor networks

—This paper describes the development of two low power wireless body sensor network (BSN) prototypes that allow the real-time monitoring of wearable sensors data from multiple users with a single base station. The prototypes present differences in the architecture, wireless network hardware and implemented protocols. These systems integrate inertial sensors that allow the monitoring of users’ posture and goniometric development, as well as heart rate and respiratory rate sensors. The design of body sensor networks is challenging due to the requirements of quality of service provisioning and low energy consumption, combined in many cases with high traffic loads. The solutions presented in this paper address these challenges, with particular focus on the implemented medium access control protocols, which overcome some drawbacks presented by standard protocols when applied to BSN scenarios. The performance of the developed systems is presented, compared and discussed using theoretical, experimental and simulation methods. Results show that the proposed mechanisms provide good bandwidth efficiency and decrease the delivery error rate without significant increase in the energy consumption.