Research Assistant Opening

Posted Tue Dec 15 2015 by Sophie Engle

The Visualization and Graphics Lab is looking to hire one research assistant for the Spring 2016 semester.

Responsibilities

The duties for the research assistant will be as follows:

  • Implementing various static (non-animated) techniques for overplotting for scatterplot matrices using the P5 JavaScript library. This will involve researching related work and implementing several different techniques (opacity, hexbinning, density plots, and contour plots).
  • 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 are willing to learn Processing and p5 and who would ideally have created basic data visualizations (bar charts, scatterplots, etc.) in Processing/p5 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.

Applications

Please send your resume by January 19th in PDF form to apjoshi@cs.usfca.edu to be considered for the position.