Sidharth Thakur

Big Board: Teleconferencing Over Maps for Shared Situational Awareness

Collaborative technologies for information sharing are an invaluable resource for emergency managers to respond to and manage highly dynamic events such as natural disasters and other emergencies. However, many standard collaboration tools can be limited either because they provide passive presentation and dissemination of information, or because they are targeted towards highly specific usage scenarios that require considerable training to use the tools. We present a real-time gather and share system called “Big Board” which facilitates collaboration over maps. The Big Board is an open-source, web based, real time visual collaborative environment that runs on all modern web browsers and uses open-source web standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C). An evaluation of Big Board was conducted by school representatives in North Carolina for use in situational understanding for school closure decisions during winter weather events. The decision to close schools has major societal impacts and is one that is usually made based on how well a teenage driver could handle wintry precipitation on a road. Collecting information on the conditions of roads is especially critical, however gathering and sharing of this information within a county can be difficult. Participants in the study found the Big Board intuitive and useful for sharing real time information, such as road conditions and temperatures, leading up to and during a winter storm scenario. We have adapted the Big Board to manage risks and hazards during other types of emergencies such as tropical storm conditions.

Visualizations of coastal terrain time series

In coastal regions, water, wind, gravitation, vegetation, and human activity continuously alter landscape surfaces. Visualizations are important for understanding coastal landscape evolution and its driving processes. Visualizing change in highly dynamic coastal terrain poses a formidable challenge; the combination of natural and anthropogenic forces leads to cycles of retreat and recovery and complex morphology of landforms. In recent years, repeated high-resolution laser terrain scans have generated a time series of point cloud data that represent landscapes at snapshots in time, including the impacts of major storms. In this article, we build on existing approaches for visualizing spatial–temporal data to create a collection of perceptual visualizations to support coastal terrain evolution analysis. We extract terrain features and track their migration; we derive temporal summary maps and heat graphs that quantify the pattern of elevation change and sediment redistribution and use the space–time cube concept to create visualizations of terrain evolution. The space–time cube approach allows us to represent shoreline evolution as an isosurface extracted from a voxel model created by stacking time series of digital elevation models. We illustrate our approach on a series of Light Detection and Ranging surveys of sandy North Carolina barrier islands. Our results reveal terrain changes of shoreline and dune ridge migration, dune breaches and overwash, the formation of new dune ridges, and the construction and destruction of homes, changes which are due to erosion and accretion, hurricanes, and human activities. These events are all visualized within their geographic and temporal contexts.

A Versatile Platform for Instrumentation of Knowledge Worker's Computers to Improve Information Analysis.

Information analysis tasks are becoming increasingly complex as the growth in volume and variety of available data continues to outpace methods to automatically analyze it. The result is an increasing burden on knowledge workers. Industry and academia are currently lacking platforms and tools that can help provide enterprise-wide understanding of how humans analyze information. Through instrumentation of knowledge workers activities during analysis tasks, we can enable research into techniques that address this need. Several research and design challenges need to be addressed, however, to develop scalable, robust and efficient instrumentation methods for collecting streaming data on relevant human-machine interactions. This data is typically high volume and multi-modal. We present an instrumentation platform to meet these and future challenges in better understanding and improving the craft of information analysis. Our platform provides an extensible framework to instrument analysts workstations during information processing tasks, and includes a streaming data processing pipeline that supports real-time analysis of large volumes of event data. We have built the instrumentation platform using the latest open-source scalable and flexible web components and hardware infrastructure. Researchers from science, engineering, and humanities are using our platform to gain insight into tool usage, analytical workflows, and collaboration patterns. Several use cases from these groups are described. Our platform provides a unique, pragmatic and holistic foundation to understand the behavior of knowledge workers, and to support applications that assist with information analysis.

Journaling Interfaces to Support Knowledge Workers in Their Collaborative Tasks and Goals

Assisting teams of knowledge workers achieve common strategic and tactical goals is becoming an increasing priority as information analysis tasks become more complex. Tools to monitor and support individual workers, such as TaskTracer, demonstrated the potential for assisting individuals but there is a lack of tools for analyzing workflows and information needs at a collaborative level within enterprises. Providing assistance for collaboration is a current priority for the new generation of ‘smart digital assistants’ and presents unique challenges, in terms of associating collective goals with user activities in way that minimizes disruption to the users workflow, and in generating useful summaries. To address these challenges, we have developed ‘Journaling’ interfaces to: capture a user or teams tasks and goals, associate them with information artifacts, assist in information recall, and display aggregate visualizations. These interfaces are supported by a passive instrumentation platform that aims to monitor users consented activities in a minimally intrusive manner, including interactions with various applications, documents and URLs as part of collaborative workflows. We have deployed these interfaces in a production environment using heterogeneous workflows performed by groups of students and intelligence analysts. Evaluations based on user interviews and engagement metrics suggest that our approach is useful for understanding and supporting user collaboration, as well as being easy to work with and suitable for continuous use. In addition, the data gathered provides situational awareness for individuals, teams, educators and managers. Through our platform, we are enabling continuous collection of labelled user activity logs and document corpora that are enabling further research in this nascent field.

Quaternion maps of global protein structure.

The geometric structures of proteins are vital to the understanding of biochemical interactions. However, there is much yet to be understood about the spatial arrangements of the chains of amino acids making up any given protein. In particular, while conventional analysis tools like the Ramachandran plot supply some insight into the local relative orientation of pairs of amino acid residues, they provide little information about the global relative orientations of large groups of residues. We apply quaternion maps to families of coordinate frames defined naturally by amino acid residue structures as a way to expose global spatial relationships among residues within proteins. The resulting visualizations enable comparisons of absolute orientations as well as relative orientations, and thus generalize the framework of the Ramachandran plot. There are a variety of possible quaternion frames and visual representation strategies that can be chosen, and very complex quaternion maps can result. Just as Ramachandran plots are useful for addressing particular questions and not others, quaternion tools have characteristic domains of relevance. In particular, quaternion maps show great potential for answering specific questions about global residue alignment in crystallographic data and statistical orientation properties in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data that are very difficult to treat by other methods.

Visualization of the Molecular Dynamics of Polymers and Carbon Nanotubes

Research domains that deal with complex molecular systems often employ computer-based thermodynamics simulations to study molecular interactions and investigate phenomena at the nanoscale. Many visual and analytic methods have proven useful for analyzing the results of molecular simulations; however, these methods have not been fully explored in many emerging domains. In this paper we explore visual-analytics methods to supplement existing standard methods for studying the spatial-temporal dynamics of polymer-nanotube interface. Our methods are our first steps towards the overall goal of understanding macroscopic properties of the composites by investigating dynamics and chemical properties of the interface. We discuss a standard computational approach for comparing polymer conformations using numerical measures of similarities and present matrix- and graph-based representations of the similarity relationships for some polymer structures.

X3DBio2: A visual analysis tool for biomolecular structure comparison

A major problem in structural biology is the recognition of differences and similarities between related three dimensional (3D) biomolecular structures. Investigating these structure relationships is important not only for understanding of functional properties of biologically significant molecules, but also for development of new and improved materials based on naturally-occurring molecules. We developed a new visual analysis tool, X3DBio2, for 3D biomolecular structure comparison and analysis. The tool is designed for elucidation of structural effects of mutations in proteins and nucleic acids and for assessment of time dependent trajectories from molecular dynamics simulations. X3DBio2 is a freely downloadable open source software and provides tightly integrated features to perform many standard analysis and visual exploration tasks. We expect this tool can be applied to solve a variety of biological problems and illustrate the use of the tool on the example study of the differences and similarities between two proteins of the glycosyltransferase family 2 that synthesize polysaccharides oligomers. The size and conformational distances and retained core structural similarity of proteins SpsA to K4CP represent significant epochs in the evolution of inverting glycosyltransferases.

Exploration of polymer conformational similarities in polymer-carbon nanotube interfaces

We are using molecular simulations to investigate the interface between the polymer matrix and the carbon nanotube reinforcement, which is the key aspect of the bulk properties of nanocomposites. These simulations are typically analyzed with standard techniques like graphs and animations; however, existing methods are limited for certain exploratory tasks for analyzing the interfacial domains. We present a supplemental exploratory approach that employs standard effective visual-analytical techniques to analyze spatial and temporal properties of the polymer-carbon nanotube interfaces. Our approach is based on a computational method that uses a numerical measure of similarity to compare multiple molecular conformations. We discuss some numerical measures for exploring the behavior of polymer molecules in interfacial domains and present a matrix-based visualization to display and explore local and global similarity relationships of the polymer structures, including dynamical aspects. These methods constitute our initial efforts for using visual-analytical tools to relate the interfacial dynamics to macroscopic properties of the nanocomposite interfaces.