Maneesh Agrawala
Forest Baskett Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering
Computer Science
Bio
Maneesh Agrawala is the Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. He was previously a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley (2005 - 2015). He works on computer graphics, human computer interaction and visualization. His focus is on investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of audio/visual media. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in both interactive and automated design tools. He received an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2006, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and an NSF CAREER Award in 2007, a SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award in 2008, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2009.
Academic Appointments
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Professor, Computer Science
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Professor (By courtesy), Electrical Engineering
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Faculty Affiliate, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)
Administrative Appointments
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Director, David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation (2015 - Present)
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Professor, Computer Science (2015 - Present)
Honors & Awards
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Research Grant, Okawa Foundation (2006)
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CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2007)
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Research Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2007)
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Significant New Researcher Award, ACM SIGGRAPH (2008)
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Fellow, MacArthur Foundation (2009)
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SIGCHI Academy, ACM SIGCHI (2021)
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ACM Fellow, ACM (2022)
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
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Advisor, Human Computation Journal (2013 - Present)
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Science and Creativity Advisor, Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen (2012 - Present)
Program Affiliations
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Symbolic Systems Program
Professional Education
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Ph.D., Stanford University, Computer Science (2002)
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B.S., Stanford University, Mathematics (1994)
Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Computer Graphics, Human Computer Interaction and Visualization.
2024-25 Courses
- Data Visualization
CS 448B (Aut) - Exploring Computational Journalism
COMM 281, CS 206 (Win) -
Independent Studies (13)
- Advanced Reading and Research
CS 499 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Advanced Reading and Research
CS 499P (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Curricular Practical Training
CS 390A (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Curricular Practical Training
CS 390B (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Project
CS 399 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Project
CS 399P (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Study
SYMSYS 196 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Work
CS 199 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Work
CS 199P (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Master's Degree Project
SYMSYS 290 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Part-time Curricular Practical Training
CS 390D (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Senior Project
CS 191 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Writing Intensive Senior Research Project
CS 191W (Aut, Win, Spr)
- Advanced Reading and Research
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Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- Data Visualization
CS 448B (Aut) - Exploring Computational Journalism
COMM 281, CS 206 (Win) - Human-Computer Interaction: Foundations and Frontiers
CS 347 (Spr)
2021-22 Courses
- Data Visualization
CS 448B, SYMSYS 195V (Aut) - Exploring Computational Journalism
COMM 281, CS 206 (Win) - Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
CS 547 (Win) - Human-Computer Interaction: Foundations and Frontiers
CS 347 (Spr)
- Data Visualization
Stanford Advisees
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Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Connor Lin -
Postdoctoral Faculty Sponsor
Abe Davis, Chuan Yan -
Orals Evaluator
Connor Lin -
Master's Program Advisor
Maya Avital, Anna-Luisa Brakman, Justine Breuch, Laura Castro Venegas, Karina Chen, Dana Chiueh, Niles Egan, Tianyu Fang, Andrew Franks, Melody Fuentes, Wanrong He, Pedro Jeha Civita, Christopher Kelly, Mark Laurie, Jonathan Lee, Janice Li, Miles McCain, Paige Olson, Brendan Reeves, Jeong Shin, Helena Vasconcelos, Katherine Wang, Yingke Wang -
Doctoral (Program)
Jean-Peïc Chou, Jiaju Ma, Sharon Zhang, lvmin Zhang
All Publications
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Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2024; 43 (4)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3658150
View details for Web of Science ID 001289270900067
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Bridging the Gulf of Envisioning: Cognitive Challenges in Prompt Based Interactions with LLMs
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2024
View details for DOI 10.1145/3613904.3642754
View details for Web of Science ID 001266059701009
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A Unified Differentiable Boolean Operator with Fuzzy Logic
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2024
View details for DOI 10.1145/3641519.3657484
View details for Web of Science ID 001282218200090
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STIVi: Turning Perspective Sketching Videos into Interactive Tutorials
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2024
View details for DOI 10.1145/3670947.3670969
View details for Web of Science ID 001325256200021
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Editing Motion Graphics Video via Motion Vectorization and Transformation
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2023; 42 (6)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3618316
View details for Web of Science ID 001139790400057
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EMPHASISCHECKER: A Tool for Guiding Chart and Caption Emphasis.
IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics
2023; PP
Abstract
Recent work has shown that when both the chart and caption emphasize the same aspects of the data, readers tend to remember the doubly-emphasized features as takeaways; when there is a mismatch, readers rely on the chart to form takeaways and can miss information in the caption text. Through a survey of 280 chart-caption pairs in real-world sources (e.g., news media, poll reports, government reports, academic articles, and Tableau Public), we find that captions often do not emphasize the same information in practice, which could limit how effectively readers take away the authors' intended messages. Motivated by the survey findings, we present EMPHASISCHECKER, an interactive tool that highlights visually prominent chart features as well as the features emphasized by the caption text along with any mismatches in the emphasis. The tool implements a time-series prominent feature detector based on the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm and a text reference extractor that identifies time references and data descriptions in the caption and matches them with chart data. This information enables authors to compare features emphasized by these two modalities, quickly see mismatches, and make necessary revisions. A user study confirms that our tool is both useful and easy to use when authoring charts and captions.
View details for DOI 10.1109/TVCG.2023.3327150
View details for PubMedID 37922182
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Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
2023
View details for DOI 10.1109/ICCV51070.2023.00355
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SlideSpecs: Automatic and Interactive Presentation Feedback Collation
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2023: 695-709
View details for DOI 10.1145/3581641.3584035
View details for Web of Science ID 001302573800049
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Tree-Structured Shading Decomposition
IEEE COMPUTER SOC. 2023: 488-498
View details for DOI 10.1109/ICCV51070.2023.00051
View details for Web of Science ID 001159644300045
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ZoomShop: Depth-Aware Editing of Photographic Composition
WILEY. 2022: 57-70
View details for DOI 10.1111/cgf.14458
View details for Web of Science ID 000802723900007
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Modular Information Flow through Ownership
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2022: 1-14
View details for DOI 10.1145/3519939.3523445
View details for Web of Science ID 000850435600001
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Disentangled3D: Learning a 3D Generative Model with Disentangled Geometry and Appearance from Monocular Images
IEEE COMPUTER SOC. 2022: 1506-1515
View details for DOI 10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.00157
View details for Web of Science ID 000867754201074
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Measuring Compositional Consistency for Video Question Answering
IEEE COMPUTER SOC. 2022: 5036-5045
View details for DOI 10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.00499
View details for Web of Science ID 000867754205030
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Sketch-Based Design of Foundation Paper Pieceable Qilts
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2022
View details for DOI 10.1145/3526113.3545643
View details for Web of Science ID 001046841800032
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A Mathematical Foundation for Foundation Paper Pieceable Quilts
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2021; 40 (4)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3450626.3459853
View details for Web of Science ID 000674930900032
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Vid2Player: Controllable Video Sprites That Behave and Appear Like Professional Tennis Players
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2021; 40 (3)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3448978
View details for Web of Science ID 000695551400005
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Iterative Text-Based Editing of Talking-Heads Using Neural Retargeting
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2021; 40 (3)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3449063
View details for Web of Science ID 000695551400001
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EVALUATING FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY: A PROTOCOL FOR PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT IN NEW DOMAINS
DENVER LAW REVIEW
2021; 98 (4): 753-773
View details for Web of Science ID 000686480300001
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The Role of Working Memory in Program Tracing
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2021
View details for DOI 10.1145/3411764.3445257
View details for Web of Science ID 000758168003011
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Analysis of Faces in a Decade of US Cable TV News
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2021: 3011-3021
View details for DOI 10.1145/3447548.3467134
View details for Web of Science ID 000749556803005
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AGQA: A Benchmark for Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoning
IEEE COMPUTER SOC. 2021: 11282-11292
View details for DOI 10.1109/CVPR46437.2021.01113
View details for Web of Science ID 000742075001047
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Editing Self-Image
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
2020; 63 (3): 70–79
View details for DOI 10.1145/3326601
View details for Web of Science ID 000582584200023
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Searching the Visual Style and Structure of D3 Visualizations
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS
2020; 26 (1): 1236–45
Abstract
We present a search engine for D3 visualizations that allows queries based on their visual style and underlying structure. To build the engine we crawl a collection of 7860 D3 visualizations from the Web and deconstruct each one to recover its data, its data-encoding marks and the encodings describing how the data is mapped to visual attributes of the marks. We also extract axes and other non-data-encoding attributes of marks (e.g., typeface, background color). Our search engine indexes this style and structure information as well as metadata about the webpage containing the chart. We show how visualization developers can search the collection to find visualizations that exhibit specific design characteristics and thereby explore the space of possible designs. We also demonstrate how researchers can use the search engine to identify commonly used visual design patterns and we perform such a demographic design analysis across our collection of D3 charts. A user study reveals that visualization developers found our style and structure based search engine to be significantly more useful and satisfying for finding different designs of D3 charts, than a baseline search engine that only allows keyword search over the webpage containing a chart.
View details for DOI 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934431
View details for Web of Science ID 000506166100114
View details for PubMedID 31442980
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Supporting Visual Artists in Programming through Direct Inspection and Control of Program Execution
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2020
View details for DOI 10.1145/3313831.3376765
View details for Web of Science ID 000696110400054
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Answering Questions about Charts and Generating Visual Explanations
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2020
View details for DOI 10.1145/3313831.3376467
View details for Web of Science ID 000695438100139
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Generating Audio-Visual Slideshows from Text Articles Using Word Concreteness
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2020
View details for DOI 10.1145/3313831.3376519
View details for Web of Science ID 000695438100190
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Text-based Editing of Talking-head Video
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2019; 38 (4)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3306346.3323028
View details for Web of Science ID 000475740600042
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VisiBlends: A Flexible Workflow for Visual Blends
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2019
View details for DOI 10.1145/3290605.3300402
View details for Web of Science ID 000474467902023
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View-Dependent Video Textures for 360 degrees Video
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2019: 249–62
View details for DOI 10.1145/3332165.3347887
View details for Web of Science ID 000518189200022
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Optimizing Portrait Lighting at Capture-Time Using a 360 Camera as a Light Probe
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2019: 221–32
View details for DOI 10.1145/3332165.3347893
View details for Web of Science ID 000518189200020
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Editing Spatial Layouts through Tactile Templates for People with Visual Impairments
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2019
View details for DOI 10.1145/3290605.3300436
View details for Web of Science ID 000474467902057
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How to Design Voice Based Navigation for How-To Videos
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2019
View details for DOI 10.1145/3290605.3300931
View details for Web of Science ID 000474467909003
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Pinpoint: A PCB Debugging Pipeline Using Interruptible Routing and Instrumentation
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2019
View details for DOI 10.1145/3290605.3300278
View details for Web of Science ID 000474467900048
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Visual Rhythm and Beat
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2018; 37 (4)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3197517.3201371
View details for Web of Science ID 000448185000083
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Saliency in VR: How do people explore virtual environments?
IEEE COMPUTER SOC. 2018: 1633–42
Abstract
Understanding how people explore immersive virtual environments is crucial for many applications, such as designing virtual reality (VR) content, developing new compression algorithms, or learning computational models of saliency or visual attention. Whereas a body of recent work has focused on modeling saliency in desktop viewing conditions, VR is very different from these conditions in that viewing behavior is governed by stereoscopic vision and by the complex interaction of head orientation, gaze, and other kinematic constraints. To further our understanding of viewing behavior and saliency in VR, we capture and analyze gaze and head orientation data of 169 users exploring stereoscopic, static omni-directional panoramas, for a total of 1980 head and gaze trajectories for three different viewing conditions. We provide a thorough analysis of our data, which leads to several important insights, such as the existence of a particular fixation bias, which we then use to adapt existing saliency predictors to immersive VR conditions. In addition, we explore other applications of our data and analysis, including automatic alignment of VR video cuts, panorama thumbnails, panorama video synopsis, and saliency-basedcompression.
View details for DOI 10.1109/TVCG.2018.2793599
View details for Web of Science ID 000427682500026
View details for PubMedID 29553930
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Converting Basic D3 Charts into Reusable Style Templates
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS
2018; 24 (3): 1274–86
Abstract
We present a technique for converting a basic D3 chart into a reusable style template. Then, given a new data source we can apply the style template to generate a chart that depicts the new data, but in the style of the template. To construct the style template we first deconstruct the input D3 chart to recover its underlying structure: the data, the marks and the mappings that describe how the marks encode the data. We then rank the perceptual effectiveness of the deconstructed mappings. To apply the resulting style template to a new data source we first obtain importance ranks for each new data field. We then adjust the template mappings to depict the source data by matching the most important data fields to the most perceptually effective mappings. We show how the style templates can be applied to source data in the form of either a data table or another D3 chart. While our implementation focuses on generating templates for basic chart types (e.g., variants of bar charts, line charts, dot plots, scatterplots, etc.), these are the most commonly used chart types today. Users can easily find such basic D3 charts on the Web, turn them into templates, and immediately see how their own data would look in the visual style (e.g., colors, shapes, fonts, etc.) of the templates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying a diverse set of style templates to a variety of source datasets.
View details for DOI 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2659744
View details for Web of Science ID 000423541200005
View details for PubMedID 28186898
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Mosaic: Designing Online Creative Communities for Sharing Works-in-Progress
DESIGN THINKING RESEARCH: MAKING DISTINCTIONS: COLLABORATION VERSUS COOPERATION
2018: 105–29
View details for DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60967-6_6
View details for Web of Science ID 000432741300007
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Improving Comprehension of Measurements Using Concrete Re-Expression Strategies
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2018
View details for DOI 10.1145/3173574.3173608
View details for Web of Science ID 000509673100034
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RecipeScape: An Interactive Tool for Analyzing Cooking Instructions at Scale
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2018
View details for DOI 10.1145/3173574.3174025
View details for Web of Science ID 000509673105052
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An Interactive Pipeline for Creating Visual Blends
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2018: 188–90
View details for DOI 10.1145/3266037.3271646
View details for Web of Science ID 000494261200064
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Facilitating Document Reading by Linking Text and Tables
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2018: 423–34
View details for DOI 10.1145/3242587.3242617
View details for Web of Science ID 000494260500037
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Computational Video Editing for Dialogue-Driven Scenes
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2017; 36 (4)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3072959.3073653
View details for Web of Science ID 000406432100098
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Interactive Design and Stability Analysis of Decorative Joinery for Furniture
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2017; 36 (2)
View details for DOI 10.1145/3054740
View details for Web of Science ID 000400160000008
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Mosaic: Designing Online Creative Communities for Sharing Works-in-Progress
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2017: 246–58
View details for DOI 10.1145/2998181.2998195
View details for Web of Science ID 000455087800019
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Shot Orientation Controls for Interactive Cinematography with 360 degrees Video
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2017: 289-297
View details for DOI 10.1145/3126594.3126636
View details for Web of Science ID 000455360100025
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Scanalog: Interactive Design and Debugging of Analog Circuits with Programmable Hardware
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2017: 321-330
View details for DOI 10.1145/3126594.3126618
View details for Web of Science ID 000455360100028
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Automatically Visualizing Audio Travel Podcasts
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2017: 165-167
View details for DOI 10.1145/3131785.3131818
View details for Web of Science ID 000494270500048
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Generating Personalized Spatial Analogies for Distances and Areas
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2016: 38-48
View details for DOI 10.1145/2858036.2858440
View details for Web of Science ID 000380532900004
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Data-driven Adaptive History for Image Editing
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2016: 103-111
View details for DOI 10.1145/2856400.2856417
View details for Web of Science ID 000382213700013
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QuickCut: An Interactive Tool for Editing Narrated Video
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2016: 497-507
View details for DOI 10.1145/2984511.2984569
View details for Web of Science ID 000387605000046
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VidCrit: Video-Based Asynchronous Video Review
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2016: 517-528
View details for DOI 10.1145/2984511.2984552
View details for Web of Science ID 000387605000048
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Capture-Time Feedback for Recording Scripted Narration
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2015: 191-199
View details for DOI 10.1145/2807442.2807464
View details for Web of Science ID 000381012500023
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SceneSkim: Searching and Browsing Movies Using Synchronized Captions, Scripts and Plot Summaries
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2015: 181-190
View details for DOI 10.1145/2807442.2807502
View details for Web of Science ID 000381012500022
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Interactive Furniture Layout Using Interior Design Guidelines
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
2011; 30 (4)
View details for DOI 10.1145/1964921.1964982
View details for Web of Science ID 000297216400061
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CommentSpace: Structured Support for Collaborative Visual Analysis
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2011: 3131-3140
View details for Web of Science ID 000395171603024
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Perceptual Guidelines for Creating Rectangular Treemaps
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS
2010; 16 (6): 990-998
Abstract
Treemaps are space-filling visualizations that make efficient use of limited display space to depict large amounts of hierarchical data. Creating perceptually effective treemaps requires carefully managing a number of design parameters including the aspect ratio and luminance of rectangles. Moreover, treemaps encode values using area, which has been found to be less accurate than judgments of other visual encodings, such as length. We conduct a series of controlled experiments aimed at producing a set of design guidelines for creating effective rectangular treemaps. We find no evidence that luminance affects area judgments, but observe that aspect ratio does have an effect. Specifically, we find that the accuracy of area comparisons suffers when the compared rectangles have extreme aspect ratios or when both are squares. Contrary to common assumptions, the optimal distribution of rectangle aspect ratios within a treemap should include non-squares, but should avoid extremes. We then compare treemaps with hierarchical bar chart displays to identify the data densities at which length-encoded bar charts become less effective than area-encoded treemaps. We report the transition points at which treemaps exhibit judgment accuracy on par with bar charts for both leaf and non-leaf tree nodes. We also find that even at relatively low data densities treemaps result in faster comparisons than bar charts. Based on these results, we present a set of guidelines for the effective use of treemaps and suggest alternate approaches for treemap layout.
View details for Web of Science ID 000283758600016
View details for PubMedID 20975136
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Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations
27th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2009: 1303–1312
View details for Web of Science ID 000265679301014
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Visualizing dynamic architectural environments
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
2004; 47 (8): 54-59
View details for Web of Science ID 000222905900015
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Non-invasive interactive visualization of dynamic architectural environments
Annual Symposium of the ACM SIGGRAPH
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2003: 700–700
View details for Web of Science ID 000184291700058
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Designing effective step-by-step assembly instructions
Annual Symposium of the ACM SIGGRAPH
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2003: 828–37
View details for Web of Science ID 000184291700075
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Cognitive design principles for visualizations: Revealing and instantiating
25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive-Science-Society
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOC PUBL. 2003: 545–550
View details for Web of Science ID 000232001900111
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Sketches for design and design of sketches
Conference on Human Behaviour in Design
SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN. 2003: 79–86
View details for Web of Science ID 000185894200007
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Conveying shape and features with image-based relighting
IEEE Visualization 2003 Conference
IEEE. 2003: 349–354
View details for Web of Science ID 000189041100042
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Rendering effective route maps: Improving usability through generalization
SIGGRAPH 2001
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2001: 241–250
View details for Web of Science ID 000173048800025
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Efficient image-based methods for rendering soft shadows
Computer Graphics Annual Conference
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2000: 375–384
View details for Web of Science ID 000165991100042
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Artistic multiprojection rendering
11th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering
SPRINGER-VERLAG WIEN. 2000: 125-?
View details for Web of Science ID 000166978600012
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Model-based compression for synthetic animations
International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP-96)
IEEE. 1996: 417–420
View details for Web of Science ID A1996BG63F00105