Maria Beatriz Carmo

Evaluation of Overcluttering Prevention Techniques for Mobile Devices

The increasing popularity of mobile devices has fostered the development of visualization applications for these devices. However, the reduced screen size and different interaction devices, which people are not familiarized, present some challenges to visualization in a mobile environment. This paper describes how, as a proof of concept, a combination of two different techniques can reduce the over cluttering of icons on a mobile device screen. An evaluation of these techniques is also presented.

Monitoring and debugging message passing applications with MPVisualizer

MPVisualizer (Message Passing Visualizer) is a tool for the monitoring and debugging of message passing parallel applications with three components: the trace/replay mechanism, the graphical user interface and a central component, called visualization engine. The engine, which plays the main role during the replay phase, builds an object-oriented model of the application. Taking full advantage of inheritance and polymorphism the tool can be adapted to different message passing environments and different graphical environments, and easily reprogrammed to detect specific predicates. The engine is also prepared to recognize race conditions.

Visualization of geographic query results for small screen devices

The visualization of geo-referenced information on a map has become an essential method to help the users to get the intended information. The adaptation of visualization techniques for mobile devices, such as, PDA and mobile phones make this type of applications ubiquitous. However, the context of mobility and the limitations of mobile devices, such as, the small screen, suggest that some visualization techniques may not be appropriate for those devices. In this work we intend to integrate filtering mechanisms, based on semantic criteria, and to use multiple representations with different levels of detail to generate intelligible representations as a result of geographic queries in mobile environments.

MoViSys --- A Visualization System for Geo-Referenced Information on Mobile Devices

Visualization of geo-referenced information on mobile devices can be useful in diverse areas. These applications require a user-friendly interface to enable querying the data interactively and the generation of intelligible images. Moreover, they must deal with the limitations of mobile devices, such as small screen size, and the context of mobility. This paper describes MoViSys, a visualization system for geo-referenced data, organized in several categories with multiple attributes, on mobile devices. This system explores filtering mechanisms to present the result of interactive queries specified through an adaptive interface.

Filtering mechanisms for the visualization of geo-referenced information

This paper describes a prototype of a web tool for the visualization of geo-referenced information organized in several categories. The main features that distinguish this tool from others with the same purpose are the inclusion of filtering mechanisms based on semantic criteria and the use of multiple representations with different levels of detail. Filtering mechanisms contribute to reduce the amount of displayed data allowing the generation of intelligible representations. The user selects interactively the categories she/he is interested in. This is a basic filtering mechanism, but besides this, a degree of interest function is used to include semantic criteria. This function quantifies the users interest in order to visualize the most relevant data, suppressing the less relevant data.The definition of multiple representations with different levels of detail enables the reduction of the detail when small scales are being used. In addition less detailed representations are used to present less relevant data.

MPVisualizer: A General Tool to Debug Message Passing Parallel Applications

The paper describes MPVisualizer (Message Passing Visualizer) a general purpose tool for the debugging of message passing parallel applications; its three components are the trace/replay mechanism, the graphical user interface and the central component, called visualization engine. The engine, which plays the main role during the replay phase, can be used with different message passing environments and different graphical environments. This is a major step to make MPVisualizer a general tool. Additionally, the engine is able to recognize potential race conditions and can be easily re-programmed to detect specific predicates.

Context aware point of interest adaptive recommendation

Applications that allow the users to search for nearby points of interest have, recently, become very popular amongst mobile device users. However, the increasing amount of available information and the limitations of current mobile devices can hinder an efficient and helpful user experience. It is fundamental that what is shown to the user is relevant. We propose an adaptive recommendation function that uses location and temporal contexts combined with the historical context of the previous searches to quantify the relevance of the points of interest shown to the user.

Chameleon -- A Context Adaptive Visualization Framework for a Mobile Environment

The evolution of mobile devices, especially the integration of sensors, is fostering the development of context aware visualization applications. The adaptation to usage contexts is crucial to overcome the diverse limitations that exist in a mobile device, namely the screen size. However, most of the currently develop applications focus on specific contexts. In this paper we propose an adaptive visualization framework that has the goal of enabling the development of applications that use a diverse set of contexts and adaptation methods.

IVPrototype - an information visualization prototype

IVPrototype is an information visualization prototype for the visualization of both geometrical and non-geometrical data. Our goal is to provide a generic system that automatically generates data visualization and dynamically adapts the interface according to the data in order to control the amount of information displayed. The information is organized in one or several information groups, which aggregate semantically related information. Icons and coloured surfaces are the visual mappings provided. Other features of this prototype are: a data independent architecture; several filtering mechanisms; use of degree of interest functions; automatic selection of icons based on scale factor and semantic criteria.

Evaluation of HaloDot: visualization of relevance of off-screen objects with over cluttering prevention on mobile devices

The complexity of presenting and exploring large amounts of graphical data, on mobile devices, increases due to their small screen size. To mitigate this problem several approaches have been proposed to give clues about objects that are located off-screen. In this paper we present a user study comparing the Halo off-screen visualization technique with HaloDot, our approach that aims to improve direction awareness, as well as, relevance of offscreen objects, and to avoid cluttering of Halos. The study shows that searching and pointing relevant Points of Interest (PoI) can be achieved faster than with Halo and that the proposed aggregation method is useful.