Christmas 2010

As per usual, I will now blog about events that happened weeks ago.

First, I saw some of the lunar eclipse, which was the first total lunar eclipse in 3 years and the first total lunar eclipse on the day of Winter Solstice since 1638! Unfortunately for most of the time, the moon was hidden behind clouds.

For Christmas, I was on Saltspring Island from Dec. 22nd - 28th. Christmas was much like Thanksgiving, my whole family + one (this time Eric) crammed into my parent's new place and we did a few things outside, but the weather was crappy and my dad managed to re-injure his leg. I think perhaps all of us visiting is bad luck. I think he will be fine, but the injury has meant he won't be skiing again soon.

Farley and I arrived on a ferry Wednesday night.

The house was all decorated with lights, a Christmas tree and this little village of houses.

My little sister played the piano at least once a day while we were there. She is the youngest but probably the most musical of our whole family, since she is also learning the flute.

My brother Ben showed up on Thursday. Ben, my two sisters and I played some games of Robo Rally. I won one of them and my sister won the second after a great come back.

On Friday, it was Christmas eve. Rebecca and Eric showed up and we iced lots of gingerbread cookies.

We had smarties, mints, chocolates and three colours of icing. Farley chipped at the mints with a knife in order to create a powder which he sprinkled on his gingerbread man. My man looked like some kind of bird.

We played a game of Rumikub, like Rummy except with tiles. I did pretty bad on the last round but won the game by a lot of points.

On Christmas morning there was much giving of presents. My little sister made me a board game by drawing a map on a piece of paper and making many cards as well as folding some paper frogs for the game pieces. We played it and I managed to win.

The cat terrorized the window sticker town.

My brother Ben got me the portable edition of Settlers of Catan which we played a few times. I won the first game but lost all the rest. It's very convenient for playing in a car or on the ferry and the only thing I don't like is how the desert always has to be the middle hex.

I also got my sisters Dominion, a card game that is very quick and fun to play. We played it more than anything that week and my sister and I won as a team the first time.

We also had a couple family games nights. For the first one we were in pairs and earned points in completing the lyrics to Christmas songs, talk about it (like taboo), outburst, charades, and probe. On the second night we played the dictionary game (like Balderdash) and minutes to limit a game where you try and come up with words that start with a certain letter and fit a certain category.

My little sister and I went on a walk at dusk and she showed me around the bushes down the far side of their property. Then we cut down the neighbors drive way (which is partly on their property) and walked to one of the nearby lakes.

At dusk the lake looked very spooky. I also went on a walk with my mom and Ben to another lake during the trip and another walk with Natalie at 10pm where we saw a star made out of lights that appeared to hang in mid air. Walks at night are pitch black because there are no street lights. There is also not much of a shoulder so we took a flashlight to let cars know we were there.

Triscuit like to lie by the fire.

I played disc golf three times on the trip with scores around par 4. At the start of the second game Farley lost his disc way off to the side in the bushes. The wet weather made the ground a swamp and so we were all clambering over logs looking for it when my dad slipped and hurt his leg. He also fell onto the lost disc. Farley also lost his disc on the first throw of the third game but I found it without anyone getting hurt.

On boxing day my grandpa and his wife visited and I learned a little more of my family history. Two of my great grandparents were born in Scottland and that side of the family is from Glasgow. This is where the Dunsmuir name comes from. Farley left us on this day to meet his girlfriend in Surrey.

On Monday, the last full day on the island we went on a tour of the island, visiting some of the beach access.

It is too bad the weather was ugly while I was there. Of course, I didn't expect to be able to go swimming so I hadn't brought my swim trunks. In the summer, it will be awesome to visit their place though, because they are surrounded by 3 lakes, all within walking distance and you can swim in any of them. Christmas was very fun with lots of family time and board games...soo many board games!

Up next...a camping trip in the Grand Canyon followed immediately by a conference in Vegas.

Visiting Seattle

Back on Dec. 18th I spent only 8 hours in Seattle but it was first time seeing Seattle so I tried to soak up as much as I could.

I was dropped off near the Space Needle.

Instead of going up the needle, I decided to check out the science fiction museum and experience music project.

There was one room with many pieces of science fiction props, a timeline of science fiction and many video clips to watch. R2D2 was in the robots section.

An animatronic Donatello was also behind glass.

They had a fan-made borg costume and also this face piece that Patrick Stewart wore when Picard was transformed into a borg in a Star Trek TNG episode.

They also had the model used as the Death Star in Star Wars. It is about a meter wide and the backside of it is not complete. Instead you can see inside it where they put a light bulb to make light shine out of it.

Upstairs they had a Battlestar Galactica exhibit and since I've never seen a full episode this chart was useful.

They had a couple full size ships from the series along with a model of the galactica main ship. They also had some costumes that characters on the show have worn. What was most entertaining to me was an interactive monitor that presented moral choices that occurred in the show. Then I had to pick an action and it told me what percent of people agreed with me and also a clip of what they actually did on the show.

The experience music project was cool too. They had this big sculpture made of nearly 700 instruments stuck together, 40 of which are self-playing instruments. The big exhibit there was for Jimi Hendrix who I'm not really a fan of but it was still interesting. I went into a theater and watched part of a concert of his where he smashed his guitar, poured gasoline on it and then lit it on fire. At the EMP they also had many booths where you could learn to play an instrument and rooms where you could record yourself. I could have spent most of a day in these two places if I had more time.

Back outside I walked around the building to see its crazy architecture. In the area was a closed down carnival with some little rides. There was also a monorail but I wanted to walk across Seattle.

My next stop was the Hurricane Cafe which some friends recommended to me as a place to really fill up - a typical greasy spoon diner. I had a taco salad there that was really good. Then I walked to downtown Seattle and along the waterfront for a while passed many piers until I reached Pike Place market. It's like Granville Island except inside one giant building in many levels going up a hill. Seattle is much steeper than Vancouver.

I went passed the fish market which didn't look too amazing except that everyone was taking photos of it, so I did too.

Then I visited the library which is shaped really weird with an overhang.

The 4th floor is all red.

The escalators are all very green and the stairs are orange.

I sat on the big open 10th floor for a while and read a book.

The walls were sloped inward on two sides.

They were sloped outward on the other two sides. Later I went online with my laptop on the library's free wifi. I talked to Gordon who told me the library was designed to look like a stack of books. Ah, now it makes more sense.

Outside I went back over near Pike Place to visit the original Starbucks because I had a couple more hours until my bus left.

On the way I passed this very odd building that I wouldn't want to work in.

I went south and located the Amtrak station where my bus wasn't going to leave for an hour so I searched for food in the area. There wasn't much around there but I found a place called Samurai Noodles. Upon entering, I was surprised to find all the employees were caucasian. I'm so used to having any asian restaurant in the lower mainland be actually run by asian people. Anyways, the food was still quite good.

My bus trip back was uneventful as I slept almost the whole way but had to wake up to walk through customs at the border. I got home around 1am and collapsed into bed. I had succeeded in visiting all the places my friends suggested. My brother went to Seattle a couple weeks later and saw a lot more of it than I did because he did not restrict himself to just the downtown area. Next time I'm there I definitely want to check out the chocolate factory/shop he went to.

Visiting Boeing

Last week I went on a journey south to the Seattle area to take part in a face to face meeting between people from SFU, UBC, Dalhousie and Boeing. The Dalhousie group is joining our Canadian visual analytics efforts and I went to present a demo of our software CZSaw to them and to people at Boeing. I also got to see the big Boeing factory. I didn't take any photos of any part of it though.

My supervisor originally asked me if I was free Mon - Wed to visit Boeing and then later he wanted me to come down Sunday and return Wednesday. I wanted to go to Brad's sushi birthday dinner on Sunday night so I hoped to go down late Sunday. So he said I could rent a car and drive down late Sunday and I would get reimbursed. Unfortunately, I haven't driven a car in a year and a half. Driving an unfamiliar rented car in the dark in the winter across an international border is not my idea of the best way to begin driving again. Luckily some other people were heading down super early Monday morning.

I was picked up around 6:15am in Surrey. Near Seattle we used the HOV lane to skip most of the traffic and get to the Bellevue Boeing site perfectly on time. We were given special passes to get passed the gate which labeled us as international guests who needed to be escorted. The morning talks were by software engineers at Boeing and they were quite interesting. They provided lunch in the same room and then in the afternoon I gave my presentation.

The only thing I screwed up on during the trip was forgetting to bring my HDMI to VGA adapter to be able to plug my mac into the projector. I still don't know where it is. When I got there in the morning I realized that all the Boeing employees had Dell laptops. Also, all the guests with macs had the new mini ports so they had different adapters. So I was forced to do the presentation on my supervisor's laptop. We were prepared for that as a backup though.

The presentation went great. I was demoing the old version 1 of CZSaw, while we have been working on developing version 2. Progress is slow on the new version and it's not ready for a good demo. By now I am very used to demoing CZSaw 1 as I did it many times at VAST. I went through many different features during my 20 minute presentation. There was some good discussion and questions about it.

After my presentation, a Phd student and a professor from SFU Burnaby gave a presentation on some text analytics that could be added to CZSaw. They were the ones that gave me a ride down to Seattle and they proceeded to give a demo using CZSaw with some data they had crafted. It was awesome that they were able to give a demo after just receiving CZSaw a couple weeks before and with no training and on a different operating system (Mac) then my demo. Woot.. Java! Still, it was hard to watch him accomplish things the long way around instead of the quick ways I use. Apparently a few things need to be more intuitive. The extensions they propose to our tool would be great and I look forward to working with them soon.

After all the presentations we had a break before dinner plans, so I checked into my hotel room and went online. I ended up doing some programming on version 2 before heading out to dinner. We had dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant and the food was pretty good. I had grilled swordfish. After dinner I did a lot more coding to get ready for our internal demo of CZSaw version 2 later that week back at SFU.

The next day I had to wake up early (7am) to head north to the Everett Boeing factory. I caught a ride with some professors at 8am after the continental breakfast. We were given a presentation from some ergonomics Boeing people about reducing injuries that mechanics get. Over the last few months, one of our students used Tableau and helped them very quickly analyze some data to determine what tasks were causing the most injuries. Tableau allowed them to shrink a task that would have taken weeks in Excel down to only a matter of hours in Tableau.

After the presentation we caught a little bus across the Boeing campus to the giant airplane factory. The factory holds many planes being built in 4 bays with huge doors that can be opened to tow a plane out. Inside the bays are open with the ceiling about 6 floors up (there are 6 floors of offices between the bays). We had to wear protective glasses and were driven around on 3 little carts through the streets inside the factory.

We got to go inside two 777 planes at different stages of production. We were in the cargo hold of one and in the passenger cabin of the other. It was before any of the inside lining had covered things up and you could see a huge space above the cabin that I didn't know was there. Apparently on long flights, crew can sleep up there. The planes were part of a moving line as they slowly move forward the whole time across the bay floor. They have to be all finished by the time they reach the end of the bay so that they can then be wheeled out the door. So basically, pieces of planes go in one side and finished planes come out the other. The coolest thing about the factory was just how massive the building is and how big the planes are inside it. Normally you don't really get close to a plane outside of it, you just walk down the enclosed ramp. It was cool to walk under the huge tail wing of a 777 and marvel at how it gets off the ground.

After the tour we caught a bus back to the first building and ate lunch in the cafeteria where they had a huge variety of food. Then we drove back to Bellevue. There were some business meetings in the afternoon which I sat in but mostly because I had no where else to go. I did some coding. That night we had dinner together at a delicious Mexican restaurant. That was after my supervisor and all the professors from Vancouver already left. I failed to get the schedule changes that there was nothing really happening on Wednesday, so while they went back I had another night in the hotel.

Luckily I made up for it by getting a meeting scheduled to demo CZSaw one on one to a software engineer / analyst at Boeing. It was another great meetings as he had some good feedback about the tool and how we might improve it. I think we will take trips to Boeing more often now.

After the early morning meeting I met up with another student and a guy from a Vancouver Boeing subsidiary to catch a ride to downtown Seattle. I spent 8 hours in Seattle seeing the sight before heading home. I took a lot of photos for that part of the trip, so I'll put that in the next blog post.

VisWeek 2010

So, it has been about a week since I returned from VisWeek 2010. This year's conference was just as educational and fun and probably more useful to me than last year's conference. There were many more SIAT students there this year than last year and my research group was attending with a different agenda this year.

I was volunteering once again so we flew in on Saturday the day before the conference. I did some registration bag stuffing which was supposed to be 1:45 but was really only 20 minutes because we finished everything. Then in the evening there was a quick training session where they basically read out the online FAQ's about the volunteer tasks. I wasn't doing anymore shifts until Wednesday after VAST.

This year I began the conference Sunday morning with a 3 minute presentation along with many other 3 minute presentations from award winners involved in the VAST Challenge. It was in this rather small room in front of about 50 people.

Those in my CZSaw research group received an award for Mini Challenge 1 and also along with some other students we were given an award for our Grand Challenge entry too. The workshop was all day Sunday with presentations and a panel in the morning. There were some interesting ideas about how to change the challenge for next year. They might add or edit the data halfway through it or they might have a challenge with less of an absolute answer underneath everything (closer to real life challenges).

At lunch Eric and I went out to lunch with Awalin, another grad student from U of Maryland. She won an award in Mini Challenge 3 by using a plagiarism detector on genetic sequence data. Another Mini Challenge 3 winner came from a research group that came up with many crazy ideas when brainstorming solution methods. One involved each genetic stream being used as the pattern for the levels of a zombie video game. His name was Harshawardhan, but if anyone said his name it was usually just shortened to Harsh.

In the afternoon there was a time for everyone to give demos to everyone else although really everyone was just wandering around to others spots and I was busy giving demos half the time so I didn't talk to everyone else. The other half the time Eric was giving demos.

I demoed for Will, a student from UBC who won a VAST challenge with a team from there 3 years ago. He had seen the very early version of my Semantic Zoom View when it was a class project in a class we both took at UBC last fall. Now it is part of CZSaw and it's my thesis project.

I demoed for John Stasko, the professor at Georgia Tech who created the system CZSaw's data views were inspired by. That was great because we had a conversation about how the two systems are different and the hard problems to tackle. When he saw the SZV (that is my thesis) he was interested enough to say that he must get his student to come talk to me about it, so a little later I was demoing it for the student and explaining the algorithms behind it. I don't worry about them copying my approach. Instead I'd be really happy if they did because it'd mean they also think it's useful to analysts. I suppose this is one large difference between academia and the corporate world.

I demoed for Pascale Proulx, a lady from Oculus Info Inc., the leading Visual Analytics software company in Canada. They make really cool temporal geographical software called GeoTime and a visual analytics environment called nSpace. She was there to receive their award for Mini Challenge 1. They have won an award 4 out of 5 years now. She seemed interest in the SZV too, but unfortunately our demo was cut short because the demo session was over. I failed to remember to give her my card and except for her presentation the next day I never saw her again. I believe after the presentation she must have caught a flight out.

Next there was a short discussion about the future of the challenge and then a conclusion. Most of the main challenge organizers are not going to be directly involved anymore and it will need to be run by volunteers so it may be challenging to put one on next year. One of their biggest tasks is making up the fake data for the challenges.

So Monday and Tuesday there was the Visual Analytics Science & Technology conference (VAST) and I went to almost all the paper sessions for it. There was also a VAST Challenge panel Monday afternoon and my co-supervisor Chris presented for our group. Here's one of the organizers slides announcing our award.

Here's a slide I made for Chris' presentation that shows my Semantic Zoom View. It helped us to solve the challenge. After the VAST Challenge panel, there were fast forward, 30 second long presentations as trailers for the posters and interactive demos. Eric did you fast forward presentation.

The last thing left for Eric and I to do with regards to CZSaw was demo it throughout the week. We had registered it as an interactive demo so we at least needed to demo it during the poster sessions Monday and Wednesday evenings. Originally they put us at the dark end of one of the poster rooms. Not many people came by and got a demo.

Then they moved us to the bright open exhibit room which was packed during the breaks. The reason it was packed was because that's where they put the coffee and the snacks. Here I am with the CZSaw poster, used both during the workshop and the rest of the week in our demo spot.
One of the people I demoed for is Chris Stolte, vice president of Tableau software. Tableau would be an awesome place to work as they make software for data visualization that is so much better than Excel. I am using Tableau for analysis of my data for the study that's part of my thesis. Anyways, he was impressed enough by CZSaw and the SZV that he asked me what I was currently doing and I said I was graduating soon. Then he said Tableau was hiring. I said I would love to work at a company like Tableau and he said Tableau needs people who can make interactive visualizations like the ones I have made. It was awesome! Of course first I have to focus on graduating. He said he's not allowed to tell me to apply before I have graduated. I said I would not throw away 2 years of my life by just dropping out. I've got to finish first. He went to Stanford but he also did his undergrad at SFU. Anyways, I gave him my card.

Throughout the week Eric and I demoed for a variety of students and professors and people from industry. We demoed for Ted Selker, who invented the trackpoint, the little nub in the middle of the IBM thinkpad keyboards that is an isometric joystick for moving the cursor around. I also gave him my card.

When I was volunteering during the second half of the week Eric did much demoing of CZSaw, sometimes to large crowds. CZSaw definitely got a lot of attention between winning the awards and being demoed throughout the week.

With the fun of being a student volunteer I connected with many more students than I otherwise would. However the more useful part of the conference was the demoing of CZSaw that really helped me show my work and skills to some key people in industry. They not only gave us some useful feedback for further development of our tool, but also now hopefully they remember who I am.