“Mensch und Computer 2018” in Dresden!

The Mensch und Computer conference took place from Sep 2 – 5, 2018 in Dresden, Germany. With a notable number of 770 participants from both research and industry the Mensch und Computer 2018 is again one of the largest German-speaking IT and HCI conferences in Europe. Together with our colleagues from the chair of Human-Computer Interaction, we as members of the Interactive Media Lab were particularly involved in the organization of the conference. And one of our goals was to let this conference be an inspiring event for all participants. In the gallery you can find selected photos, in which various impressions of the Mensch und Computer 2018 in Dresden have been captured.

AVI 2018 in Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy

From May 29 to June 1, the 2018 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (short AVI 2018) took place in Castiglione della Pescaia (Grosseto, Italy). As a cooperation between several ACM SIGs, this biannual conference is hosted at different locations in Italy.
This year, Ricardo Langner presented two contributions of the Interactive Media Lab Dresden. During the workshop on Multimodal Interaction for Data Visualization we showed our work “Combining Interactive Large Displays and Smartphones to Enable Data Analysis from Varying Distances“, in which we discuss first ideas and interaction concepts as part of our research project Multiple Coordinated Views at Wall-Sized Displays. With “Demonstrating VisTiles: Visual Data Exploration Using Mobile Devices” we also presented the prototype as well as implemented visualization and interaction concepts of the VisTiles project.
Some impressions of the scientific part and non-scientific program can be found in the twitter feed of the conference @AVIConference.

PhD Defense of Ulrich von Zadow

On May 14, 2018 Ulrich von Zadow successfully defended his dissertation as part of the Interactive Media Lab Dresden. Congratulations from all of us, Ulrich!

The topic of his dissertation was “Personalized Interaction with High-Resolution Wall Displays” and addresses the localization of multiple users in front of wall-sized displays, the according adaptation of user interfaces, and the analysis of user behavior. We are happy that Olivier Chapuis from the university Paris-Sud, France agreed to act as external reviewer of his thesis. After Ulrich’s great talk and successful discussion of the work, the event was celebrated at a restaurant in Dresden’s city center. A small photo gallery provides a view into this special day.

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PhD Defense of Ulrike Kister

Ulrike Kister defended her dissertation on May 8, 2018 as another very successful PhD student of the Interactive Media Lab Dresden. Her topic Interactive Visualization Lenses addresses the support of data exploration for multiple users at wall-sized displays with the help of configurable analysis tools. She combines aspects of the two research fields human-computer interaction and information visualization. We are very happy that Petra Isenberg from AVIZ research group (Inria) agreed to act as external reviewer for this thesis. After her great defense, the entire Interactive Media Lab and guests celebrated at a nice restaurant near the Loschwitz Bridge. Some impressions of the great day can be found in our small photo gallery.

We congratulate Ulrike Kister on her great dissertation and wish her all the best for her future endeavors.

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Nine Contributions & Honorable Mention Award at ACM CHI 2018

At this year’s ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), our group presents nine accepted contributions – 1 full paper, 2 Late Breaking Work articles, 2 demonstrations, 1 co-organized workshop and 3 workshop contributions. The ACM CHI is the biggest and most important conference in the field of human-computer interaction and will take place in Montreal, Canada from April 21 to 26, 2018. We are particularly pleased about the honorable mention award (top 5%) for our full paper When David Meets Goliath: Combining Smartwatches with a Large Vertical Display for Visual Data Exploration. The paper is the result of a cooperation from Tom Horak and Raimund Dachselt with Karthik Badam and Niklas Elmqvist from the University of Maryland. The focus of the work is the combination of smartwatches and large interactive displays for data analysis. We will also present the corresponding prototype of this work in an accompanying CHI Interactivity demonstration.
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Doctorate Martin Spindler

With Martin Spindler another PhD student of the Interactive Media Lab Dresden very successfully defended his dissertation on February 12, 2018. Congratulations from all of us on this impressive achievement, Martin! The topic of the dissertation was “Tangible Displays”, which comprises, among others, six (!) full papers and one journal article. We were able to win Prof. Dr. Jürgen Steimle of Saarland University as external supervisor. As the PhD was started in Magdeburg, some ceremonial traditions from Magdeburg enriched the festivity in Dresden. Afterwards, Martins success was celebrated in a restaurant at the campus of Technische Universität Dresden. The doctorate supervisor, Raimund Dachselt, provides some impressions of this special day in a photo gallery.

Again, we congratulate Martin on his dissertation and wish him all the best for the next chapter in his life.

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Three Contributions at this Year’s ACM ISS 2017

ACM ISS'17

At this year’s ACM ISS (formerly known as ACM ITS) our group presented three accepted contributions – two full papers and one demo contribution. The 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces took place in Brighton, UK from October 17th to 20th, 2017. This year, Raimund Dachselt served as one of the program chairs, together with Diego Martinez Plasencia and Tovi Grossman. Wolfgang Büschel presented our full paper Investigating the Use of Spatial Interaction for 3D Data Visualization on Mobile Devices. In this paper, we investigated how mobile devices can be used to explore 3D data visualizations with mobile devices. Additionally, Fabrice Matulic presented the paper Hand Contact Shape Recognition for Posture-Based Tabletop Widgets and Interaction. Finally, we are very happy that Konstantin Klamka, Wolfgang, and Raimund received the Best Demo Award for their IllumiPaper demo Illuminated Interactive Paper with Multiple Input Modalities for Form Filling Applications. We also added some photos to our gallery.

Paper and Poster at IEEE VIS 2017 in Phoenix, AZ, USA

The IEEE VIS, the leading conference on visualization research, took place in Phoenix, Arizona, USA from October 1 to 6. Ricardo Langner and Tom Horak represented the Interactive Media Lab with both a paper and a poster. On Tuesday, Ricardo gave his talk on our paper VisTiles: Coordinating and Combining Co-located Mobile Devices for Visual Data Exploration in the opening session of the InfoVis track. Notably, the first ideas for VisTiles were presented as a poster at VIS last year, received an honorable mention, and became now a full paper. Our second contribution was presented on Wednesday: Tom showed and explained our poster Improving Value Driver Trees to Enhance Business Data Analysis (poster PDF) during the poster session. Again, IEEE VIS has been an exciting and inspiring conference as also can be seen in our photo gallery.

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Keynote and Paper at EuroVA and EuroVis 2017

The European Conference on Visualization Eurographics/IEEE EuroVis took place this year from June 12 to 16 in Barcelona, Spain. EuroVis is an annual conference organized by the Eurographics Working Group on Data Visualization and supported by IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (IEEE VGTC). A number of additional workshops are co-located with EuroVis. The 8th International Workshop on Visual Analytics EuroVA 2017 was opened on Monday with Raimund Dachselt giving a keynote on Natural Interaction for Enhancing Visual Analytics.
Beside Raimund Dachselt, Ulrike Kister represented the Interactive Media Lab Dresden at EuroVis this year. On Friday she presented our paper GraSp: Combining Spatially-aware Mobile Devices and a Display Wall for Graph Visualization and Interaction. In this work, mobile devices are applied to graph analysis as personal toolboxes with a variety of different analysis functions. All in all, we had a sucessful conference with many interesting talks and discussions. Some impressions of the event and our contributions can be seen in our photo collection.