conference at pompeu fabra university

I just attended a three-day conference on information visualization (IV09) in Barcelona. It was the first infoVis conference I have ever attended (note that I picked up some jargon) and it also was the first conference where I did not know anybody at all on the first day. The visualizers turned out to be a friendly bunch and I made friends with researchers from Taiwan, Japan, Scotland, Israel and Spain. I also learned a lot about the field during those three days.

My presentation was on our Gaoseng Zhuan 高僧傳 project, and though the “stable” server crushed at the end of the talk, I got a very positive response. Especially the idea to link markup to Google Earth, and Joey’s brand new place selector tool generated a lot of interest.

The slides for the talk are here .

Things are done a little different in computer science, conferences have high rejection rates, all papers are published already at the beginning of the event, and participants like to take their lunch standing. Our paper came out as: Marcus Bingenheimer, Jen-Jou Hung, Simon Wiles: “Markup meets GIS – Visualizing the ‘Biographies of Eminent Buddhist Monks’.” In Proceedings Information Visualization IV 2009. Edited by E.Banissi et.al. Published by the IEEE Computer Society. ISBN: 978-0-7695-3733-7. pp.550-554. DOI: 10.1109/IV.2009.91

It describes the general set-up of the project. We will follow up with a paper that describes the interface design in detail especially the latest tools that were added (e.g. time and place selectors) and did not make it into the IV09 paper.