As Eliot points out in his post, most of the papers are online at various locations on the Interwebs and the links are all aggregated at Ke-Sen Huang’s site. Make sure you check out “Finding Paths through the World’s Photos“, especially if you’ve been following Microsoft Labs’ Seadragon implementation Photosynth. Extremely cool.

On Thursday I attended a Computer Animation Festival Talk called “Flash Forward: A forum on Flash’s Increasingly Vital Role in Games, Online Entertainment, Art and Academia.” There was a great panel for the talk that included Evan Spiridellis, one of the co-founders of JibJab and Cartoon Network’s Greg Araya who has worked extensively on “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.” It was a nice mix of demonstrations of great character animation, web interfaces, and entertainment, as well as an interesting peek into the Flash animation pipeline for major productions. It was really kind of pitiful, though, that nobody from Adobe was anywhere to be found either in the session or on the Exhibition floor.

And finally, on Friday, I attended an extremely interesting class on Transportation Visualization. The instructors for the class were Theresa-Marie Rhyne from North Carolina State University, Michael Manore of AEC Visualization, and Ronald Hughes from North Carolina State University. All three are members of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Visualization in Transportation. The instructors were very interested in starting a collaborative dialog with graphics professionals and to express the need for assistance from the SIGGRAPH community. Visualizations have taken the form of 3D models and fly-throughs for construction projects, abstract data visualizations using real-time graphics, and others. The class focused on a series of examples provided by the instructors. As an introduction to the current needs in transportation visualization, the class was very successful. There was a great discussion during the Q&A with a researcher at Carnegie-Mellon who was interested in developing Augmented Reality applications and asked about RFID tagging and available sensor data in current construction and transportation projects. I’ve been interested in data visualization in general for some time, but I will be working on a project next summer with Professor Paul Barron in the Law School (and current Tulane CIO) during which we will be working with approximately 5 years of peer evaluation data from his Negotiation and Mediation Advocacy course. I’m working on implementing Flash/Flex charting and learning Processing (an open source programming language aimed at visual designers). I’m looking forward to having a good time playing around with ways to visualize the data.

And finally, for this post at least, yesterday afternoon I attended a fascinating class offered by Mine Ozkar and Sotirios Kotsopoulos called “Visual Thinking Via Shape Grammars”. This was my first formal exposure to the idea of shape grammars, though I have heard the term before. The theory was initially presented by Stiny and Gips in 1972 and includes the idea of shape computation following rules defined in a grammar of shape. The theory has both fascinating explanatory power and useful generative power, depending on the purposes for which it is applied. Kotsopoulos gave many examples from architecture employing the theory both as an explanatory analysis and as a generative tool. I have to say, this class was right up my philosophical alley. Similar enterprises have a long-standing history in philosophy, culminating in Anglo-American analytic philosophies of the middle of the last century, but having expression in the work of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Alfred North Whitehead to name just a few.