Introduction
Hello! My name is Joshua Rodriguez, and I am a Computer Science student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This page will contain the updates to my CREU project for this school year.
Week One
Week one is the official start of my research project. As such I spent a large amount of my work researching D3 and visualizations in general. The book I am using for visualization research is "Visualization Analysis and Design" by Tamara Munzner.
Week Two
In week two I continued my visualization research by reading some more from the Tamara Munzner book. I also began to use the D3 library to create a visualization of gun violence in the united states. The visualization will be linked to this page upon completion. It will use data available at http://slate-interactives-prod.elasticbeanstalk.com/gun-deaths/getCSV.php
Week Three
This week saw the continuation of the research readings from the Tamara Munzner book and learning to use the D3 library.
Week Four
I completed the gun death project and it is linked here: Gun Map
Week Five
I began to work importing the server data and designing a simple layout for what the project will look like.
Week Six
A lot of work was put into this three week period. This week was used to finalize my initial prototypes for the layout of the display. I have set up a meeting for next week to go over it with Lance and get some feedback to revise my design.
Week Seven
A lot of work was put into this three week period. I was able to get feedback from Lance in regards to the visualization prototypes. He thought what I had decided for the layout would be a good start and gave me some feedback on color scheme
Week Eight
A lot of work was put into this three week period. Firstly, I was able to finish the initial prototype and get feedback from Lance. He thought what I had decided for the layout would be a good start and I was able to get started working towards creating a basic visualization of the important network data.
Week Nine
A lot of work was put into this three week period. Using the information I got from my feedback I was able to get started working towards creating a basic visualization of the important network data. After a full week of work I was able to put together this simple view.
obviously this image is really large as the data being displayed is meant for a large scale monitor display. So it is truly meant to be viewed on a wall of hd monitors. The color scheme is going to change as is the final layout, but this is a starting point for learning the skills that will be required to complete the project.
Week Seven
This week was entirely spent preparing for interviews. As my time at UIC nears it's end I knew that if I wanted to land a job for immediately after my graduation I would have to start early. This week was a culmination of that work. Not only did I have multiple interviews, but one of them included a paid flight out to Virginia to see the company campus that I would be working on. Having completed the interviews I felt very confident that I would be hearing back from at least one of the companies.
Week Eight
IEEEVis is coming up and as such these two weeks were used to prepare. I was required to man the EVL's table during the poster sessions and at that time display the work that I have done on server visualizations. In order to prepare I set up the sage2 environment to run on my laptop. This caused some initial issues as my macbook does not have a large scale monitor display with which I could properly show the application.
Week Nine
IEEEVis is coming up and as such these last two weeks were used to prepare. This week I was focused on attempting to overcome some of the visualization issues of displaying the application on my laptop. I was able to adjust the view ratios enough so that I could display the entire visualization on the small screen, however it was hard to read the information so I removed some of the displayed information in order to have a more accurate representation of what the visualization will ultimately look like.
Week Ten
IEEEVis 2015 Conference! This week was spent entirely focusing on getting the most out of the conference as possible. I attended a plethora of talks and spent some time representing the EVL in the poster sessions. I was able to show my work to a few people in the vis field and they were able to give me valuable feedback and recommendations for how to continue working on vis research in the future.
Week Eleven
After IEEEVis conference I was able to get some feedback about my visualization design so I decided to develop another set of prototypes based on some of the information I got from professionals in the industry and other members of the EVL.
Week Twelve
Had another meeting with Lance to talk about some of the feedback I received at IEEEVis. We decided to move forward with a visual streamlining of the application. Immediately after our meeting I started working on the new application design.
Week Thirteen
This week I made a great amount of progress on the new visualization design. I also had to take time out from this week in order to perform some job interviews.
Week Fourteen
These last four weeks have seen a lot of development on the project. The old interface has been entirely redesigned.
The energy section of the application is now complete. The power consumption will continue to be tracked and the graph axis' will change to reflect this. The image currently just shows the last few timestamps. The rest of the visualization will follow the same scheme so that it will be one cohesive visualization.
Week Fifteen and Sixteen
This is the last week of school and finals week. This time will be spent preparing for all of the finals I have and working on the poster proposal for Tapia 2016. Hopefully with the work that I have done I will be able to be accepted into the poster session. My experience at IEEEVis was great and I would love to attend another conference.
I have also finished the background check process for a potential employer and I have a job setup for after I graduate. I am more excited for the future than I have ever been before!