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New members in the VIS group


We are happy to announce that Janine Zöllner and Jorik Jakober have joined the VIS group to pursue their PHD’s in the area of application-based Virtual Reality research. Janine will be working on radiochemistry applications and Jorik in the medical domain.

Goodbye


We say goodbye to our colleagues Sylvia Saalfeld and Sebastian Wagner. Sylvia went to the Technical University of Ilmenau to lead the group for Computational Medicine. Sebastian went to work in the industry. We thank Sylvia and Sebastian for the scientific work they contributed to our group and for the great time we had together with them as our colleagues. We wish them all the best for their future!

Narrative Visualizations to Communicate Medical Data

The Covid 19 pandemic has once again shown how important it is to communicate medical knowledge and research insights to a broad audience without medical expertise in an understandable way. Recently, narrative visualization, i.e. the combination of storytelling techniques with interactive graphics is used to communicate scientific findings to a broad audience. Many tools have been developed to generate narrative visualizations based on tabular data. However, it is unclear to what extent these tools are also suitable for medical data, which also include 3D surface and volume data, as well as 2D slice images.

Figure 1: Authoring tool Ellipsis to generate stories based on tabular data [1].

Goal: The goal should be to do an extensive literature review. It shall be analyzed which software solutions are available for the creation of data-driven narrative visualizations and on which input data they are based. In addition, it will be analyzed to what extent existing tools are suitable for dealing with medical data and which requirements a medical-oriented tool for the creation of narrative visualizations should fulfill. Optionally, user interfaces can be prototyped and evaluated for such a medical authoring tool.

Type: Bachelor/Master Thesis (Team project (2 FIN students) would also be possible)

Requirements: Good skills in scientific reading and summarizing scientific papers; critical thinking; good transfer skills regarding the derivation of requirements for a medical narrative tool as well as analysis skills whether this is possible with existing tools.

References
[1] Satyanarayan, A., and Heer, J. “Authoring narrative visualizations with ellipsis.” Computer Graphics Forum. Vol. 33. No. 3. 2014.: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cgf.12392
[2] Conlen, M., and Heer, J. “Idyll: A markup language for authoring and publishing interactive articles on the web.” Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 2018.: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3242587.3242600
[3] Meuschke, M., et al. “Towards Narrative Medical Visualization.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.05462 (2021).: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.05462

Science communication on a flexible touch display setup

Goal

The project’s goal is to create a software/hardware solution that allows the university to present different projects to a broader audience. Examples for projects are:

  • results of a digital restoration of a monument of Magdeburg’s cathedral
  • overview of courses of study that the university offers

Tasks

To achieve this, the student has to:

  • research existing software tools to create interactive presentations for multi-touch displays
  • research hardware solutions for modular, flexible multi-touch displays

Based on the results of this research, the student should realize an example presentation with the software tools and the hardware.

This project can be realized as a research assistant (HiWi), bachelor thesis/master thesis or student project.