Take Home Midterm – CSE 5544

Announced - AM of March 8, 2016.

Due - Midnight of March 11, 2016.

Caveats - This exam is not a group project. It needs to be completed on an individual basis. If you find any material to help you answer the posed questions, please mention. You cannot consult with your peers. You can consult with the instructor and staff.

 

I. (150) Summarize the following paper of Jock Mackinlay now at Tableau and use it to evaluate visual encodings of your laboratory assignments.

·      The paper to be reviewed is A.J. Mackinlay: Automating the design of graphical presentations of relational information. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 5(2), 110-141, 1986.

·      This paper can also be found at http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/uir/publications/items/UIR-1986-02-Mackinlay-TOG-Automating.pdf

·      Slides explaining the manuscript listed above. I will go over the slides on Tuesday, March 8, 2016.

·    (40) Please provide a summary that describes the method in sufficient detail.

·      Use your chosen application and project to direct your summary. In essence, use the context of either Lab 1 and Lab 2 to actually determine if Mackinlay’s methods are effective.

·   (40x2) Choose two 2D presentations one from each laboratory assignment. Now examine the essential visual encodings that you employed in the labs. Now follow Mackinlay’s criteria and methods and strive to apply it to the visual encoding. If you cannot automate the chosen encodings, explain why ? If successful,  then describe your approach in using Mackinlay’s methods.

·    (30) You may or may not have been successful in creating an automated method for creating partial visualizations for Lab 1 and Lab2. In general, it is not possible to automate the production of visualizations.  Provide insights on why that is the case.

II.(50) Hive plots can be  used to visualize networks. Please peruse http://www.hiveplot.net/ How effective is this effort to get scalable large graphs. Are they effective as anti-hairball medications ?