VGL Blog

ACM Speaker Series

Posted Wed Sep 07 2016 by Sophie Engle

ACM will kick off their first talk of the ACM speaker series on September 15th at 11:45am in G12. Kan is an expert in the field of exploratory data analysis and the talk is aimed for all computer science students. Please mark your calendars. Pizza will be provided before the talk so come early!

Title

Introduction to Fast Exploratory Data Analysis Experience with R and Visualization

Abstract

R is arguably the best analytics platform in the world that is open-source with more than 9000 packages and is growing rapidly. But it's hard to start and be productive if you are not programmers. Exploratory (exploratory.io) is a desktop app that provides a simple and easy to use interactive data exploration environment where users can quickly access R's analytic power and visualization to explore various data ranging from files, databases, to NoSQL, and find valuable insights in a reproducible and collaborative way.

Presenter

Kan Nishida (@KanAugust), co-founder/CEO of Exploratory. Prior to Exploratory, Kan has 20 years of experience in building products and solutions in Big Data, Analytics, BI, and Data Visualization fields, at Oracle.

Research Assistant Opportunity

Posted Tue Sep 06 2016 by Sophie Engle

The Visualization and Graphics Lab is looking to hire one research assistant for the Fall 2016 semester. This is an on-campus job opportunity open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Responsibilities

The duties for the research assistant will be as follows:

• Assisting with the coding and analysis necessary on any of the active research projects in the lab. This includes work on visualization aesthetics and literacy, cluster heatmaps, and others.

• Assisting with the design of user studies to evaluate the efficiency and accuracy of specific visualization tasks.

• Assisting with one-on-one expert user studies.

• Assisting with writeups of user study results in preparation for publication.

Students should expect to work a minimum of 10 hours per week. If the research is successful, students will be invited to be a co-author on related publications.

Qualifications

Current undergraduate (or graduate) students may apply for the position, but must already be proficient in object-oriented programming. Most undergraduate CS majors, CS minors, and computational Data Science majors that have passed both CS 212 and CS 245, or graduates that have passed CS 601 will qualify, but others can apply too.

Strong applicants will also have some familiarity with data visualization. This includes students that take visualization-focused sections of CS 384/694 Research Seminar, CS 398/498/698 Directed Reading and Research, and CS 386/686 Special Topics in CS. It also includes students that take CS 360 Data Visualization.

We are looking for students who know or are willing to learn JavaScript and D3 and who would ideally have created basic data visualizations (bar charts, scatterplots, etc.) before they begin the research assistant position.

Applicants should also be interested in continuing the research project beyond a single semester, either in a paid position or as a directed study opportunity. Applicants must be detail-oriented self-motivated independent workers with excellent written and oral communication skills.

Email your 1 page cover letter and 1 to 2 page resume by September 16th in PDF form to vgl@cs.usfca.edu with the subject "VGL Research Assistant Position" to be considered. In your cover letter, indicate you are applying for the research assistant position and highlight your qualifications.

We have multiple open positions. Please apply for only 1 position and indicate this position in your cover letter.

Visualization Internship Opportunity

Posted Tue Sep 06 2016 by Sophie Engle

We have a unique paid part-time internship opportunity on collaborative visualization technologies. The internship will be located at an industry research lab in the SF Bay Area, and students will collaborate closely with both the Visualization and Graphics Lab and the industry research lab.

This position is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Students must already know JavaScript and want to work with both front-end and back-end technologies. Students will be held to a high standard and must be self-motivated independent workers with excellent written and oral communication skills. Experience with data visualization and D3.js is preferred. Students will be expected to sign a non-disclosure agreement before beginning the project.

Email your 1 page cover letter and 1 to 2 page resume by September 16th in PDF form to vgl@cs.usfca.edu with the subject "VGL Visualization Internship" to be considered. In your cover letter, indicate you are applying for the visualization internship and highlight your qualifications. This is a professional opportunity; your materials should have no grammatical errors and formatting inconsistencies.

We have multiple open positions. Please apply for only 1 position and indicate this position in your cover letter.

Fall 2016 Lab Meetings

Posted Fri Aug 26 2016 by Sophie Engle

Welcome back students! Our Fall 2016 lab meetings will be every Wednesday 2:15pm – 3:15pm in Lo Schiavo Science Room G12 starting on August 31st. Everyone is welcome to attend!

VINCI Publications

Posted Fri Aug 12 2016 by Sophie Engle

Congratulations to Casey Haber and Lyndon Ong Yiu (both undergraduate CS majors) on their short paper publication "Do Defaults Matter? Evaluating the Effect of Defaults on User Preference for Multi-Class Scatterplots" and to Seimei Matsusaki and Xi Han (both MSCS graduates) on their poster on "Interactive Exploration of Multidimensional YouTube Data Using the GPLOM Technique" in the 9th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction (VINCI)!