I’m truly sorry that you’ve had to endure three full weeks without any Head Voices. I’ve been in full-on Crisis Mode(tm) for the past weeks, doing my best to complete a number of projects, most prominent of which has been the brand-spanking new TU Delft first year CS course TI 1100-a. During Crisis Mode, all but the most critical of tasks have to spend some time on the back-burner. Almost like the adrenaline-fueled mammalian fight-or-flight response, when even one’s digestion is temporarily halted in order to divert all energy to for example bounding over trees whilst evading some sharp-toothed predator, even my GTD processing more or less came to a stand-till. TNR’s pomodoro suggestion, however, was a life-saver. There’s nothing like a succession of 25 minute periods of being completely in the zone for flattening mountains of work. If you’re not continuously zoning yet, I can’t more firmly recommend giving this a try.

In any case, here I am, a slightly debauched weekend drawing to a close (thank you L and friends!), joyfully writing a special anniversary Weekly Head Voices.

Photo taken of the magical entrance to Lowlands, taken by my mysterious and resourceful friend fpixel.wordpress.com

TI 1100-a (which I plan to write a detailed blog post about; the short version: All TU Delft CS first years spend their whole first week doing a single project-oriented course, which I, with much help from my friends, completely redesigned during the past months) concluded with, as far as I could surmise, some success. Fifteen groups of enthusiastic students demonstrated fifteen working augmented reality music instruments in a room packed with 140+ people, and much fun was had by all. With this more or less concluded, I still have more than enough to do, but the decrease in shoulder-weight is considerable and very welcome.

Reaching slightly further back in time to a different slightly debauched weekend, I was one of the 55000 exceptionally privileged human beings spending three life- and humanity-affirming days in the third week of August: Lowlands is not so much a music festival as a fantastic and sizeable post-human community that meets once a year to enjoy each other’s happy presence.  I had the further privilege of also being in the company of a slightly smaller group of exquisite friends. Hello there exquisite friends! Due to our still-strict policy of What happens at Lowlands, stays at Lowlands, I’m not able to give you much more information than the photo of the main festival entrance above. Please do note the huge “Welcome Home” sign at the centre, it’s quite telling.

Those of you who’ve been with this blog for slightly longer, might remember that the very first edition of the Weekly Head Voices was posted directly after last year’s Lowlands. This means that the WHV has now lasted one whole year! Astute readers will note that the actual frequency of my posts might dictate a name-change to Bi-Weekly Head Voices, which is nice (it has “bi” in there!), but is still not going to happen.

Whatever the case may be: Happy birthday Weekly Head Voices, I wish you very many happy returns!

On the topic of happy returns, and my hobby of somehow managing to string together disparate paragraphs in an almost convincing fashion, the animal that houses my consciousness also turned one year older in week 34, three days after Lowlands. I’m not mentioning this so that you can send me presents (although these are always welcome, especially if they’re gadget-related), but rather to dwell briefly on the unexpectedly fabulous day. In spite of the deadline-related stress dominating at that stage, being the happy target of a day-long deluge of such positive facebook messages, texts, email and telephone calls was just beautiful, thank you thank you thank you! I really do love being the gregarious human that I am, right in the middle of this information-age.

Alright boys and girls, it’s now time to get some rest, then to wake up bright and early, and then, then to continue on your life mission of creating value.

Related posts:

1. Starting today: Head voices, every week!
2. The Next Level. [Weekly Head Voices #22]
3. Weekly Head Voices #12: Ceci n’est pas une bibliothèque.

I couldn’t come up with a catchy title involving Dolly, so you’re going to have to make do with what I have.  When I say Dolly, I’m not referring to the cloned sheep, but to her Country singer namesake Dolly Parton.  Google seems to think that Dolly Parton (3 million hits) is more famous than Dolly the cloned sheep (1.25 million hits), so now you know. In any case, Dolly (Parton, for those of you with really short attention spans) once starred in a movie called Nine to Five and, being a famous Country singer, also performed the theme song, called, in a completely unexpected turn of events, 9 to 5. And yes, I do remember seeing the movie more or less when it came out, and I vividly remember Dolly Parton: She was on our television a whole lot, plus that her unique appearance would make it hard not to.

Dolly Parton with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda at the left and right respectively: The leading Nine to Five cast. Those were the days!

Perhaps as a kind of unicorn chaser, or, if you’re secretly a Parton fan, just as an entertaining interlude, I’d like to show you this wonderful YouTube clip of two British parkour gentlemen, who obviously have a great deal of pleasure in their chosen careers:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the good news front, our Articulated Planar Reformation (APR: remember it, use it, spread it) paper will be presented at IEEE Visualization 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah!  The citation is as follows:

P. Kok, M. Baiker, E.A. Hendriks, F.H. Post, J. Dijkstra, C.W. Löwik, B.P. Lelieveldt, and C.P. Botha, “Articulated Planar Reformation for Change Visualization in Small Animal Imaging,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2010.

It’s called a citation, because you should cite it. Often. :)

On the being-busy front, I, Captain Obvious, have recently realised that the reason I’m so busy at the moment, probably has to do with the fact that I have perhaps a few too many projects on my list! Looming and very serious deadlines are August 16,  August 27, August 30, September 15, September 16 and October 2.  These include papers and research proposals as well as the development and running of completely new undergrad and postgrad courses. Continuously feeling like a mole that has been tasked with digging a multi-lane highway through a mountain-range, I have been spending some time (not much, don’t worry) thinking about my method of working.  Once again, the most significant optimisation I could employ was minimising interruptions (facebook, twitter, email, damn email!!) and maximising periods of concentrated work. One measure that really helps is using an egg timer, real or virtual. Whilst the egg timer is counting down, you’re not allowed to touch or think about anything else besides the activity you’ve set for those 30 to 45 minutes. Once the timer goes, you have to spend 5 to 10 minutes goofing off, preferably away from the computer. If you sometimes wake up in a daze and notice that you’ve been facebooking away through the pre-lunch half-hour (20 new friends! yay! who are these people?!), the egg timer is for you!

This leads nicely to our final bit of backyard sociology, an issue that recently came up in discussions with my SO, TNR and TPN (see here for abbreviations): Which do you find the most suitable work approach, time-driven or output-driven?

In the time-driven approach, one goes to and leaves work at agreed-upon times, performing work up to some agreed-upon standard. However, when the day or the week ends, work really does too. One leaves the office, and, besides the normal mental after-effects, there is no expectation that one is going to spend time doing more work. In the output-driven approach, there is much less (or no) expectation as to the hours one will spend working.  In fact, in many cases, one is allowed to plan one’s work day as one pleases, even integrating brief stints at the beach if one’s schedule of meetings and other required physical presence so allows. However, one’s work output is measured, in terms of cases handled, papers written, students supervised, products delivered, and so forth. Even in cases where one has not taken any liberties, this often leads to work in the evenings and on the weekends.

Where I work, output-driven is the norm amongst the research staff members. It sounds like a really good deal, as one could in theory do all kinds of neat things in what is normally considered to be work-time.  In practice however, meetings, deadlines and achievement pressure all conspire to complicate capitalising on the perceived perks. In the end, days are full and evenings and weekends too. Mostly this is fine, as the type of work I do mostly overlaps with what I would consider my hobbies in any case and I can get all passionate about most of the projects I’m involved in. Also, the freedom can be exhilarating. Sometimes, however, I wonder what it would be like to leave the office on Friday and completely switch off the work part of my brain. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to spend a whole weekend thinking exclusively thoughts that have to do with family, friends and sun. Perhaps it’s got nothing to do with my job, and everything with my brain.

What do you think, time-driven or output-driven? Start-up people, what do you think about being able to switch off? Time-driven fans, care to chime in? You can let it all hang out in the comments!

Related posts:

1. I know what I want for my birthday
2. Happy returns! [Weekly Head Voices #29]
3. 2

It turns out that when any normal human being is faced with observations or evidence that oppose their already formed opinions, they tend to ignore or downplay the value of those observations. Conversely, any scrap of evidence that seems to confirm the opinion in question is considered to be good and trustworthy evidence. This is called confirmation bias: You and I both suffer from it, and it can be a dangerous phenomenon. Ideally, we would be able to judge the evidence and come to a reasonable decision, but this turns out to be exceptionally hard.

A photograph I recently took of a confirmation bias. Note that observations from below confirming preconceived ideas are favoured more than observations from above, resulting in the tell-tale yellow tinge and staircase edge at the bottom of the core.

Another interesting one is the planning fallacy: We are apparently hard-wired to underestimate the time we’ll need to complete some or other task. In other words, you always think you’ll need far less time to complete that project than you’ll end up using. Most of you have experienced this first-hand, or indirectly, when some huge IT or building project falls way behind schedule (and budget).

There is a whole list of such cognitive biases. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re basically walking jugs filled to the brim with misunderstandings, and mostly we’re unaware of it. Now you might think to yourself: But surely I’m better and more logical than the rest! I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but you’re even biased about your biases. It’s called the bias blind spot, a meta-bias that means you’ll always estimate your own unbiasedness more highly than that of your neighbour.

I hope you didn’t nod off right there, because the next topic I’d like to touch on is that of sleep (please excuse the lame joke, I needed it for the continuity). Ever thought of exactly why you get sleepy at night? Or why your teenager (or teenage sibling, or yourself; substitute whatever’s more relevant) is not able to go to bed or wake up on time? Mostly we just go through the (sleep) motions without asking why or how. When you’re exposed to light in the morning, your eyes talk to your supra-chiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a  cluster of brain-cells about the size of a grain of rice in your already small hypothalamus, which then, minute as it, starts raising your body temperature, releases the cortisol hormone (this gives you a boost) and stops the release of melatonin. When it gets dark, the SCN throws a switch which causes the pineal gland (itself just pea-sized) to start producing melatonin, another hormone, but one that makes you feel generally less alert and altogether sleepy, so you start thinking about that wonderfully fluffy and soft bed of yours, and it gets harder and harder to stay awake.

I find that really fascinating: There it is, the SCN, a rice grain sized clock that orchestrates the daily rhythm of your whole super-complex body! This helps us to explain to our toddlers why they should go to bed earlier: Because your melatonin is activated much earlier honey! (There’s no arguing with that, even when you’re 4 years old.) It also explains teenagers’ sleeping habits: Adolescent hormones and life-style seem to interfere with melatonin production, and so teenagers get their melatonin kick hours later than adults.

The hypothalamus consists of more interesting nuclei than just the SCN. The arcuate nucleus also lives there, and it’s one of the spots in your brain that produces dopamine. Dopamine rules your life. It plays an important role in just about every bit of your humanity that you care about: Motivation, punishment and reward, sleep, mood, attention, sexual gratification, learning, and so on. Dopamine is instrumental in drug addiction, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, also in ensuring that one human becomes completely and irrevocably obsessed with another when falling in love. Serotonin and norepinephrine are also involved, but dopamine is the one that makes you go completely crazy. Once you get past the crazies and you have the good fortune of finding yourself in a longer term relationship, guess what? Once again, there’s not really that much magic or even that much mystery: Oxytocin and vasopressin, two hormones that also act as neurotransmitters, help to ensure that you experience the warm-fuzzies when with your partner and hence facilitate the pair-bonding experience. Oxytocin also plays a crucial role in breastfeeding (our friend the hypothalamus notices sucking at the breast and kicks the oxytocin production into gear that gets the milk going to where it needs to be). Conveniently, it probably also plays a role in mother-infant bonding.

I could harp on for a long time about how exactly all of these (and many other) little tidbits determine your life, but by now, I hope that I’ve said enough and that you’re asking: What’s your point Vanessa?!.

My point is that you’re an animal. A cool kind of animal called the human animal, but an animal nonetheless. You’re a relatively complex machine, but a machine that can be studied and that can be understood. We humans have become incredibly skilled at picking apart the human machine. We have tools that can see which part of your brain is active during what activity, we even have tools to make the cells in your body glow in the dark when they’re being naughty. We still have much to figure out, but we know an astronomical amount more than we knew 50 years go. The points above are a microscopic example of recently acquired knowledge. Every day, the pile of Stuff We Know is growing more quickly, and the pile of Stuff We Don’t Know is shrinking more quickly. It’s a terribly exciting time to live in.

My actual point is: You’ve been given one of these human machines to drive. For life. You’ll be getting only this one, and you’ll be taking it to some strange places, even off-road at times. You’ll make a number of important decisions that deeply affect you and your machine and even the other machines around you.

Don’t you think that you should read the manual?

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #7: The Answer, a STAR is born, post-human YouTube
2. B.I.A.S.
3. UN Human Development Report 2004

Kids, I’m still here! It just that the holiday season is here, and I’m feeling all strange, but I’m super-busy, mostly because I have to put oodles of time into a cool new augmented reality project for the new computer science first years that will be arriving in the first week of September. There’s also the complicated issue of WHV-regularity vs. worthwhile content: I really like entering your visual cortex on a weekly basis, but I prefer doing so with at least some kernel of information value.

We spent some fantastic quality time, perfectly scheduled right in the middle of the Dutch heat-wave (harr harr), on Texel, beautiful little island on the North Sea. Here it is on the map:

View Larger Map

… and here it is in real life:

One fabulous unit of my genetic offspring running on what appears to be our private beach on the island, but wasn't. It was just that nice.

Here’s a nice path on that same island, just because I hope it makes you all nostalgic and pensive:

This photo makes you feel like you should go somewhere mystical, right? Photos of mysterious paths on islands do have that tendency. Check out those clouds, man...

I can do nothing but very strongly recommend that you visit an island when the weather is perfect.

(WARNING, NERD INDEX 3/5 starts here!)

In other great news, Stef’s paper on example-based exploration of multi-fields was accepted by the journal Computers & Graphics. Get it, read it, CITE IT:

S. Busking, C. P. Botha, and F. H. Post, Example-based interactive illustration of multi-field datasets, Computers & Graphics, 2010.

In spite of the fact that my TPN has not yet been able to deliver that jingle he promised, the Head Voices Review simply has to discuss a number of items that have recently been extensively analysed and, err, reviewed. We make use of the proven HVR classification system:

• Samsung SyncMaster P2370 23 inch 1920×1080 (HD) screen for my home workstation at € 185 including shipping: AWESOME. Many many pixels. Two browsers adjacent.
• Philips GoGear Ariaz MP3 player with 8G memory at € 70: MOSTLY AWESOME. I can copy music to AND FROM the player on Linux and Windows, no extra software required. Sound quality great, good in-ears. It’s a shame that the slightest perturbation to the ear-phone plug causes audible disturbance, so no carrying this in your super-tight Mika jeans pockets.
• Sony PS3 Eye USB camera at € 40: AWESOME. Based on a number of websites, we got this camera at work for doing augmented reality work, and oh my, is it fast! Just to make it an even more attractive deal, the lens is adjustable between 54 and 75 defrees of field of view.
• Nokia E71 at any price: DIVINELY AWESOME. Many of you know that I love my phone.  We’ve been together for almost two years now, and I thought that I might be falling out of love, until I ordered a new battery. Once again it manages 4 days on a single charge. Other smartphone users come to me with jumper leads when they run out of juice, and then I just smile as I jump-start their pitiful fruit-themed bricks. I have also temporarily stopped lusting after the latest and greatest Android-running keyboard-toting battery-draining super-phones. Together with the battery life, the keyboard makes this e71 the ideal phone for the socially-adept, attractive nerd with stamina. YEAH.

So boys and girls, that’s it for this week’s edition. I have to go jump-start some phones, and also do a bit of work on a slightly longer term blog project that I hope to finish sometime in the next few weeks: It’s a post called “The Human Animal Post” and with it I hope to perturb, ever so gently, some of your brain cells.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #16: Go Go Gadget!
2. Weekly Head Voices #19: The time-traveller’s BBQ.
3. Weekly Head Voices #18: Refactor my dogfood.

Last week, I accompanied Peter Schaafsma (he of the orbital fat mobility paper), Bastijn Vissers and André van Dixhoorn (they of the resting state fMRI brain connectivity paper) to Leipzig, where they had been selected to present their work at the second Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM).

Pretty VCBM logo.

Things got off to a great start when, as we were travelling there by speeding bullet (okay, it was just a brand-new rental Opel, but the Autobahn turns any car into a Speeding Bullet!), we managed to strike, at high speed, a high-quality German plastic bucket that had suddenly appeared right in the middle of the road. After a few more kilometres of noticing that our speeding bullet was not able to pass the very slowly accelerating bullet stage and was making strange disconcerting noises to boot (excuse the automotive pun), we stopped to investigate, noticing to our shock that the bucket, having been very badly burnt, Mustafa-style, was still lodged under the car.

After carefully dislodging the remaining half of the bucket, we were even more shocked to notice that the car was dripping concerning amounts of liquid more or less from the spot where the bucket had been stuck. Further on-site and online investigation by the crew brought to light the following observations: 1) The liquid was not hot, and so probably did not come from the engine. 2) The liquid was tasteless (don’t ask). 3) The air-conditioner had been running all the time, and certainly would have to get rid of water condensate from the cooled air. This latter observation was to us not immediately obvious, but now is, and hopefully to you as well: Automobile air-conditioners often get rid of condensed water through outlets under the car. Phew.

Our speeding bullet tore through the remaining 200 kilometres in record time, where my man Helmut from Vienna and these wonderful brain-boosters were waiting for us on the Nikolaikirchhof:

Leipzig's famous 1 litre brain boosters. Image deliberately deFaced. The arms in the photo might or might not belong to anyone that you know.

The conference kicked off the next morning bright and early with a brilliant keynote by Prof. Anders Ynnerman.  This was related to the great talk he gave in Delft the week before, but even better, as, amongst other things, he had had the Virtual Autopsy multi-touch table shipped all the way to Leipzig to be able to demo live during his presentation. He even managed to undo the evil our projector in Delft had wrought on his laptop’s colour profiles and finally showed his visualisations in their full glory on the projector in the Mediencampus Villa Ida.

The second keynote, given by Dr Roland Bammer, focused on their work on eliminating motion artefacts in brain MRI, both by image post-processing but also, and this is the really cool bit, by mounting a special marker on the forehead of the subject that allows real-time 3D motion tracking and linked real-time low-level correction of the MRI acquisition process. They are currently working hard on getting their tech into users’ hands. Help them by bugging your local Radiology Department about this! :)

The multi-touch virtual autopsy table was available throughout the conference to try out. Two observations: 1. Sometimes the glass surface of the multitouch.fi table is harder to work with than the MS Surface's matt finish. 2. It's hard to use the table in environments with too much lighting.

The rest of the scientific program was perfectly varied, consisting of paper presentations, an invited talks session and a posters session, including a plenary fast-forward where each poster author was given three minutes to promote their work.  What really shone throughout the two days, was the superb organisation in Leipzig: Thanks to Dr Alex Wiebel and colleagues, the conference was a text-book example of conference organisation, with each event occurring at exactly the right time, not a moment too soon or a moment too late.  The Mediencampus Ida Villa was the ideal location for the conference, not in the least due to its air-conditioned auditorium shielding us from the more than 30 degrees Celsius outside temperatures. Another important manifestation of the superb organisation were the magical coffee breaks, always taking place exactly when you needed them, with copious amounts of cookies to boot!

Erik Pernod and Herve Delingette won the VCBM 2010 Best Paper award with their paper titled Interactive real time simulation of cardiac radio-frequency ablation, really great work combining elements of simulation, visualisation and a clear clinical application.  The best paper committee had a relatively easy choice, as the reviews (3 to 4 per submission) were also unanimous about this paper’s ranking. As an added bonus, the work is available within the open-source SOFA framework.

My personal and completely biased Head Voices VCBM 2010 Best Talk Award however, goes to the invited talk by Marc Streit and Alexander Lex on Caleydo: Visual Analysis of Biomolecular Data. The presentation was an extremely entertaining show by two skilled speakers, striking just the right balance between focus and variety as they demonstrated several aspects of their Caleydo visual analysis software.  At several points, for example the explicit visual linking of different heterogeneous data sources (paper here, youtube video here, see here for other publications.), I had the typical reaction to good scientific contributions: Now why didn’t I think of that?!

Three to four of the VCBM 2010 papers (this includes the best paper of course) will soon be selected to submit an extended version to the forthcoming special issue in the Computers and Graphics journal on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine.  Very importantly: Everyone is welcome to submit an aptly themed paper to this special issue! See the C&G special issue on VCBM call for papers for more information.

On a more personal note: This was the second VCBM workshop, with the first having been held in Delft in 2008, organised by yours truly. It was really great in Leipzig experiencing the growing community around this event and especially connecting with some of my favourite people. I’m greatly looking forward to future VCBM workshops, which makes it doubly cool that  VCBM 2012 will be hosted by Prof. Anders Ynnerman in Linköping (Sweden) and that after that, it will become a yearly phenomenon.

Will you join us?

Related posts:

1. I’m on a boat! [Weekly Head Voices #20]
2. EuroVis 2010 [Weekly Head Voices #24]
3. Sometimes, being in academia rules. [Weekly Head Voices #25]

I took this photo of the Oude Kerk in Delft as we were taking a walk with one of our esteemed guests. So it's really relevant to this post, ok?

Last week we had our department’s yearly BBQ at the Blue Lagoon at Scheveningen.  In a not altogether surprising turn of events, I’ve been working at the TU for 10 years, and I now have the bunch of orange flowers to show for it! Time is really fun when you’re having flies.

Five of my MedVis (that’s IN4307; if you’re at the TU, make sure you take this life-changing course! :P ) students presented their final project work. Between the visualisations of coronary stents from optical coherence tomography data, the 3D lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS) planning tool and the real-time X-Ray simulator, I was hugely and pleasantly impressed.  Expect to see a large part of this functionality in a future release of DeVIDE. This was energy-producing event #1 of the past two weeks. Energy-producing event #2 was a M.Sc. defence that I opposed just this past Friday, where the candidate presented and defended, in a highly-entertaining and convincing fashion, his thesis on investigating 3D synthetic aperture radar construction on multi-core architectures.

Energy-producing event #3 was when the now freshly minted Dr Eric Griffith defended his PhD thesis on Visualizing Cumulus Clouds in Virtual Reality in stellar fashion.  Dr Griffith did a superb job of maintaining an eloquent discussion with all 7 of his opponents. The offence of Prof Jos Roerdink (Visualisation, Groningen) also deserves mention: The multi-level questions and typically professorial delivery were most entertaining.

The final energy-producing event that I’m going to mention has been named #4 for mysterious reasons, and, for other reasons that will soon become clear, was for me the most significant. Jorik Blaas, close collaborator and friend for the past seven (7!) years, defended his PhD on the Visual Analysis of Multi-Field Data, on Thursday June 24. To take part in the offence, we were extremely honoured to welcome three luminaries of my research field (that’s Visualisation, for those of you who’ve just joined!): Prof.dr. Jack van Wijk, Prof.dr. Anders Ynnerman and the Viennese-Bergenesque Prof.dr. Helwig Hauser. Having all three of them in Delft was just WOW, you just have to trust me on this. In any case, for the first time at the TU, I was also allowed to take my place in the PhD committee. :)

Of course, Dr Blaas sailed through the defence, his usual understated yet verbally effective hyper-intelligent self. Invited lectures by our guests, much late night discussion on the nature of (visualisation) science and of life in general and finally a PhD party that stress-tested all glandular resilience helped to turn this into one seriously wonderful and life-affirming week. I am thankful to all involved.

In completely unrelated news:

• Have you ever wondered what that funnily isolated ‘J’ character is doing at the end of sentences in emails?  Well, wonder no more! (5-second-version: it’s supposed to be a smiley, but Outlook on the sending side substitutes it with a character from the Wingdings font that is rendered at the receiving side, if that font is not available, as a ‘J’)
• My 4-year old daughter recently made a drawing with two stick figures standing next to each other. Not significant as such, but the one stick figure was wearing a bow tie, while the other stick figure had a thought bubble above its head with a bow tie in it.

Thank you for joining me again for this edition of the Weekly Head Voices, and please feel free to kick-off completely unrelated discussions in the comments.  Next week (actually this week, I’m late), four of us will be going to Leipzig for the bi-annual Eurographics workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM), which I’ll probably be reporting on in a future blog post (and hopefully on twitter with hashtag #vcbm2010). Stay tuned for much fun and excitement!

Related posts:

1. VCBM 2010 [Weekly Head Voices #26]
2. Weekly Head Voices #10: Loose bits sink chips.
3. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36

Château Faugères, youngest of the chateaux. Photo by Peter Krekel.

EuroVis is definitely the most important European scientific conference on Visualisation. For detailed and complete coverage, see T.J. Jankun-Kelly’s (he was also the uncontested tweetmaster of the conference) detailed blog posts on the first, second and third days of the conference. The post you are reading now is my very own extremely biased and mostly incomplete view of the conference and of conferences in general, which can sometimes be interesting.  Or just very misleading.

Let’s start with the basics: A scientific conference is where a bunch of mostly scientists get together somewhere in the world, ostensibly to present recent results of their research to each other. Work certainly gets presented, and in some cases it’s a treat seeing a gifted orator giving a superb presentation.

However, in my mind the primary reason to go to a conference is not to discuss work that was submitted half a year ago, but to meet with colleagues and friends and to discuss important things, such as life, science in general and the research that has not yet been published or even started up yet. It is a hugely important element of the social goo that keeps a research field coherent and cooperative.

There are numerous overlapping interest and social groups that continuously split off to discuss something or just socialise, and then merge back into the larger group. The various attendees each has their own character and associated mode of operation: Some flit around, speaking to all and sundry, some stick to and act as the backbone of the subgroup that they belong to, some walk around and think, sometimes being approach by yet another type of agent. It’s interesting to watch from the corner of one’s eye whilst one is also enjoying taking part in this system. Sometimes the backyard anthropologist in me wonders how exactly the nature of this social fabric affects the performance of science. I imagine that it would be cool to put together a taxonomy of social conference types and even map their behaviour during a single conference such as this.

In any case, at EuroVis there were, the same as last year in Berlin, 190 attendees.  Three days of presentations, with a poster session and a visit to Saint-Émilion thrown in for good measure.

With regard to the presentations, I seemed to notice an ever-so-slight upwards trend in the number of papers accompanied by open source software implementations (both MotionVA and ShapeSpaceExplorer by respectively our very own Peter Krekel and Stef Busking are open source, but there were more examples). This is really a great development, as it is an important component of the whole open science idea. With the implementations available, colleagues can reproduce one’s results and thus have a greater chance of being able to improve on them. Also, new implementations can be directly compared to existing ones, something which is currently incredibly hard.

Two of my favourite presentations were the following:

• Visual Support for Interactive Post-Interventional Assessment of Radiofrequency Ablation Therapy by Christian Rieder, Andreas Weihusen, Christian Schumann, Stephan Zidowitz, Heinz-Otto Peitgen: I really like this genre of solutions, where complex 3D problems are reduced to normalised 2D representations. A previous example is the work of Neugebauer et al. at EuroVis 2009. In this case, the authors presented “tumor maps”, a 2D map-style representation of the tumor and its surroundings which greatly facilitates the post-therapy tumor assessment. The fulltext paper will hopefully be linked on Christian’s website soon.
• Estimation and Modeling of Actual Numerical Errors in Volume Rendering by Joel Kronander, Jonas Unger, Anders Ynnerman, Torsten Möller: Although this is not my personal favourite type of research, I think the work (and work like it) is tremendously important. The authors meticulously measure the impact of different precision and sampling strategies on the volume rendering pipeline, and, as if that wasn’t enough, derive a mathematical model with which the role of these variables can be predicted in unseen volume rendering problems. In my view, this is a great example of research towards deriving elements of that elusive visualisation theory. Just to help ram the point home, the presentation was extremely well executed.

On a slightly higher level, what I’ve also started noticing is the different styles of visualisation.  Many research groups have a distinct style of visually representing their data: One can easily recognise a Viennese design, and sometimes even notice how elements thereof have been subtly adapted by a faction of ex-Viennese scientists in Bergen.  The Bergenesque style is still quite young, but will probably soon spread to different groups.  Of course not all groups are that easy: Our own style is heterogeneous, although I’m glad to see at least the blue-to-yellow more-or-less perceptually linear colour-scale starting to permeate our work. It would still be interesting to start a kind of genealogical tree showing the various styles and also how they spread along with the persons practising them.

On the topic of Saint-Émilion: 1000 vineyards covering 95% of the available land, oldest of the vineyards 2000 years old, number of beautiful old Chateaux (castles man, castles!) each having on average 6 hectares of land. 5 different classes of wine produceds, ranging from 5 euros per bottle (hello there!) up to 7000 euros per bottle. It’s a beautiful piece of country.  In fact, it reminded me very strongly of the Western Cape in South Africa,where I grew up.

My group ended up visiting Château Faugères, by far the youngest of the chateaux, but awesomely cool nonetheless, as it was designed by a Swiss-Italian architect by the awesomely cool name of Mario Botta. We got to taste one (1) wine. This was slightly less reminiscent of the vineyards of the Western Cape in South Africa, where one can taste wines until one starts developing very entertaining coordination problems. Fortunately, this very small oversight was more than compensated for by the subsequent visit to the town of Saint-Émilion, its monolithic church and the catacombs, all narrated by an extremely gifted and humorous guide, and finally by the marvelous concluding dinner, done as only the French can.

So kids, that it was it for this week’s lecture on Further Mystifying Scientific Conferences!  I have to go, as I have to start thinking about the next Weekly Head Voices.

Related posts:

1. Final day of IEEE Visualization 2007
2. Eurovis 2009
3. VCBM 2010 [Weekly Head Voices #26]

Standard hiro and kanji markers tracked simultaneously with augmented reality sphere and cube. In the background some artwork by my daughter!

I’ve called it NyARMultiBoard, and you can use it instead of the default NyARBoard if you want to track multiple markers.

Download a ZIP file containing everything (source code, jar files) from this directory.  If you unpack this into your processing sketchbook/libraries directory, it should work out of the box.  It’s a drop-in replacement for NyAR4psg, so you don’t need to have that installed as well. There is an example to get you started in NyAR2/example/NyARMultiTest.  Note: This uses the GSVideo capturing stack as I explain here, you should easily be able to change it back to processing defaults (just change GSCapture to Capture).

Please let me know in the comments if this works (or doesn’t) for you!

I made this screencast to demonstrate the multiple marker tracking, assisted by TNR:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also made this really bad screencast (old webcam + night time lighting + transcoding):

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re really into the details

I’ve just added two new classes NyARMultiBoard and NyARMultiBoardMarker to the default NyAR4psg distribution. Very importantly, NyARToolkit itself needs to be patched with one extra method in NyARDetectMarker, see the NyARMultiBoard comments.

Related posts:

1. Processing + GSVideo + NyARToolkit on Linux x86_64
2. The Visualisation and Image Processing Platform Formerly Known as DSCAS3
3. Python 2.5 enabled VTK 5.4 Windows binaries

Adding the Facebook Like button functionality wasted the most time, because there are far too many plugins and howtos that claim to work and don’t quite. I ended up using the Like plugin (official wordpress page and plugin website), because it has the best documentation that includes details on all the ways in which things can go wrong, and there are many.  I’m using the IFRAME option, also because that seems to work most of the time.  I had a hard time finding this plugin in the built-in directory, so I downloaded and installed it manually.

For the facebook share button, I use the Facebook Share (New) Button plugin, and for the retweet button, I’m using the Topsy Retweet Button plugin.  I installed both of them from the built-in “Plugins | Add New” directory.

In all three cases, I made use of the plugin options to have the buttons placed all over my blog, instead of manually editing the theme.

I hope that you enjoy your shiny buttons, and I look forward to seeing you for the next Weekly Head Voices!

P.S. feel free to click on my buttons, right below this post.

Related posts:

1. Bad, interface, bad!
2. More on Mozilla
3. Confessions of an addict

On the theme of striving for The Next Level, my not-quite-1-month-old bundle of joy laughed out loud today for the first time! I’m sure that it was not a false alarm, as I was being my usual comedic genius self (I target the 1 to 3 month-old crowd), and the pattern of stimulus and reaction was just too well-coordinated and sustained to be coincidental.

On the theme of really cool events, on Thursday I had the privilege of being part of the Best Ph.D. Defence EVAR. Seriously people, the day that my good friend Frans Steenbrink became my good friend Dr. Frans Steenbrink will pleasantly resonate in my mind for a long time to come.

A typical scene during an average Ph.D. defence. The candidate is in the middle, surrounded by committee members on both sides. At this very moment, he is investigating two possible lines of argument.

Here in NL, a Ph.D. defence is a fantastic affair: The candidate has to defend his work against the highly-experienced offensive mental manoeuvres of a committee consisting of around 7 wise men, most of them grizzled veteran professors who have eaten many a hapless candidate FOR BREAKFAST! As if that weren’t awe-inspiring enough, the defence usually takes place in some imposing building, preferably more than a few hundred years old (in this case, it was the Academiegebouw in Leiden, almost 500 hundred years old), the committee are in full academic (read: battle) garb, and the whole affair is public, so the candidate is joined by a potentially sizeable audience. Believe me, this can be a nauseatingly stressful experience.

Of course Dr. Steenbrink handled the whole affair with elegance and, extremely unusually, a healthy dose of humour. It might be the first time that I’ve ever seen a candidate disarm his opponents not only by artfully responding to their questions, but with an ever-so-slightly irreverent injection of humour. It was beautiful.

After the successful defence, we were all picked up by a boat and taken via the Leiden canals to De Poort for the after-party, and what an after-party it was… Besides the live performance of Frédérik Steenbrink, the two electro DJs, the superb saxophonist who was able to accompany them musically (!!!), the Louis Theroux-style documentary put together by Mr Cricket, and copious amounts of free beer, it was positively life-affirming to see the Master of Good Karma (the freshly minted doctor goes by many names) being surrounded by his Karma-children, all emanating. You need to know him in order to understand this completely, but you have to trust me that it was beautiful.

On the theme of understated super-heroes, I finally got around to reading Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, triggered by a Cosa Nostra t-shirt shown on boingboing. I know I know, I could have lost my Cyberpunk Nerd membership card for only reading it this late in my life…

In any case, I really enjoyed the book, especially for the characters (the protagonist, called Hiro Protagonist, is naturally a half-African American half-Korean hacker / sword-fighter / pizza delivery guy), the far-out society (the world is run by private franchises, amongst others the Mafia, owner of the extremely influential Cosa Nostra pizza chain and run by the charismatic Uncle Enzo), the crazy technological artefacts (the Rat Things!) and for all the changes in society brought about by the crazy technology, not least of which the Metaverse. The Metaverse is the name Stephenson gave to his extrapolation of various phenomena present or considered in 1992: The internet, virtual reality, Gibsonian cyberspace. The protagonists spend a portion of their time not quite jacked in, but with augmented reality goggles and high-fidelity ear-phones, walking around as avatars in an artificial world with a total population of slightly less than what facebook has now, if I remember correctly.

Personally, I didn’t find Snowcrash quite as good as Gibson’s Neuromancer (see my 2003 ode here. it still gives me goose-flesh…), but somehow, very sneakily, it has still managed to manoeuvre itself into my list of all-time favourite books.

The story is built around the interesting idea of a neuro-linguistic virus, that is a certain sequence of sounds that is somehow able to get into the human deep brain, screw things up royally and spread through verbal contact with other humans. It has a cyberspace equivalent called Snow Crash: If programmers in the Metaverse see this specially coded binary image (through their AR interfaces), their brains essentially crash and they’re turned into vegetables. It’s all very complex (see this wikipedia page) and quite far fetched, but the idea of considering certain large-scale social phenomena as a kind of mind-virus, that is a potentially damaging entity that integrates at very low level with its host, is self-replicating and is able to spread to other humans, is intriguing to say the least.

Recall that Dawkins partly coined the by now well-known English term “meme” in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, as it turns out that the concept was more or less first written about by Semon in 1904. A meme, analogous to a gene, is an element of social information, for example the mistaken idea that going outside in cold weather increases the chances of getting a cold (in this case, not true, but still a meme). Analogous to a biological virus, a mind-virus would then be built up from various memes. Each meme would take care of a different function of the mind-virus, helping to guarantee its survival and proliferation throughout humankind, for example: Don’t question me (meme1), believe in me (meme2), spread me (meme3), be exclusively faithful to me (meme4), do this or you will be severely punished (meme5), do this and you will be greatly rewarded (meme6).

If you’re wondering what I mean by all of this, rest assured in the fact that Zombo Com has all the answers.

Kids, now go and have yourselves a fantastic week!

Related posts:

1. Sometimes, being in academia rules. [Weekly Head Voices #25]
2. Weekly Head Voices #15: Auto-tune my cloud.
3. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36