Students and academics present three research papers on visual computing

Researchers from the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering presented three separate research papers (on visual computing) at the Computer Graphics and Visual Computing conference (CG&VC) 2021. 

Professor Jonathan C. Roberts (Professor in Visualisation) said “It is always a privilege to share our research results and explain our methods. But this year was special. Three different research papers were submitted by the Visualisation Data Modelling and Graphics (VDMG) group members and accepted for presentation at the conference. All research papers present the culmination of hard work”.

The annual conference is organised by the UK Chapter of the Eurographics (EGUK) Association. This year was the 39th CGVC conference and the conference was held online between 8th and 9th September 2021, followed by a third day workshop, held in person, at Lincoln. 

Academics at Bangor University have long been involved with Eurographics and the Eurographics UK chapter. For instance, Professor Jonathan Roberts was a previous EGUK chapter chair, Dr Franck Vidal (Senior Lecturer in Visualisation) conference chair and currently EGUK secretary, and Dr Panagiotis Ritsos  (Lecturer in Visualisation) was a local organiser, and programme chair, of previous events. Indeed, Bangor previously hosted CGVC in 2019 and 2007, and also organised the main Eurographics conference in 2011. This year CGVC was run at the University of Lincoln, and hosted by Dr Christopher Headleand, a former PhD student at Bangor University.

Professor Roberts went on to say “These papers, not only demonstrate a breadth of visual computing research undertaken at Bangor, but it was great to see a range of people involved, from undergraduate level, PhD student, to early career and more established academics. Indeed, we were delighted when Tobias’ won the best technical student paper award. Tobias did this research as part of his final-year project, supervised by Dr Franck Vidal (Senior lecturer in Computer Science). We wish Tobias much success in the future, especially as he has now started his Masters course in Artificial Intelligence”.

The first paper was titled “3D visualisations should not be displayed alone – encouraging a need for multivocality in visualisation”. Professor Robets gave the talk, which is a collaboration with Joseph Mearman (PhD student), Dr. Panagiotis D. Ritsos, Hayder Al-maneea (PhD student) and Dr. Peter Butcher (Postdoctoral researcher). The paper explains and encourages a need to simultaneously display many different types of visualisations. By mixing the types of visualisations, in one display, the user can gain a better understanding of the whole information. 

One figure shows images of the prehistoric standing stone, at Bryn Celli Ddu North Wales site, displayed on the touch table. The figure shows three large three-dimensional pictures of the standing stone (fully textured and rendered, line rendered version to enhance the rock carvings, and the plain shaded version), along with smaller alternative depictions.  While the user holds a tangible representation of the standing stone.

Dr Panagiotis Ritsos, explained “in the paper we demonstrated how different visual modalities, and different visualisations can be displayed in a mixed-reality setup. We have been researching into the use of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality (often collectively referred to as XR). It was good to share some of our thoughts and experiences in this field”. [EG Digital library link]

The second paper was presented by Tobias Barthelmes. Tobias did this work for his final year undergraduate project and was supervised by Dr Franck Vidal. The paper: “Where's Wally? A machine learning approach” explores how different machine learning algorithms could be used to automatically discover the location of “Wally” in a crowd. Dr Franck Vidal said “It is often a challenge to find Wally in a mass of other people. Writing and training computing programs to find `Wally’ was a real challenge.” [EG Digital library link]

The third paper was presented by Professor Roberts. The paper titled “Learning activities in colours and rainbows for programming skill-development" explains how a set of bilingual STEM learning activities were created and delivered. Professor Roberts said “The project was motivated by the many rainbows that people placed in their front windows, to celebrate the National Health Service during the COVID pandemic. We presented how we created the STEM lessons and structured the online learning environment.” Professor Roberts went on to say, “The learning material is bilingual Welsh/English and can be followed from the CSEE website". [EG Digital Library link].

 

Thumbnail images of some of the learning activities available on Project Rainbow, csee.bangor.ac.uk.

 

 

Some of the online participants at the 2021 CGVC conference.

[Author: JCR, Editor PR]

Publication date: 27 September 2021