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CapCHI Activities
Past Activities 1997-1998
- 1998/06/17 - Giza: An Object-Oriented Framework for Visualization presented by Marc-Antoine Parent and Luc Beaudoin.
- 1998/05/21 - Interactive Graphics and Computer Animation at NRC in the 70's presented by Nestor Burtnyk and Marceli Wein.
- 1998/04/16 - "The Decade of the Arrow" - An Interactive Multimedia Database for High-Speed Networks, presented by Victoria Dickenson.
- 1998/03/17 - Designing for the Real World presented by Austin Henderson.
- 1998/02/17 - Web User Interface Design presented by Roger Chang.
- 1998/01/20 - Use of Semantic Modelling in a User Interface Framework presented by Kevin McGuire.
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Giza: An Object-Oriented Framework for Visualization
June 17, 1998
About the Speakers
Marc-Antoine Parent works in the HCI group since 1995, as Advisor. Specialist in object-oriented design, he contributed to the realization of many software projects in the last 15 years. His taste for abstraction led him to work in such diverse areas as information visualization and computational linguistics, after studies in neurobiology and mathematical logic. For the past two years, he has been working on the Giza framework whose aim is to support the CHEOPS (tm) approach.
Luc Beaudoin has been an advisor in CRIM's HCI group since 1995. A specialist in visual design and communication applied in HCI, he has been working in the field for 15 years. He has developed interfaces for many domains, such as Telecommunications, Internet applications, Business applications, Medicine, Teaching, Defense, Languages, etc. Luc received his Bachelor in Fine Arts from Concordia University (1984), with a DEC in applied arts and graphics, Cégep Vieux-Montréal (1981). He was a pioneer in computer assisted animation in Québec, and winner of the 1984 Norman McLaren award for exceptional realization in film animation. Inventor of CRIM's CHEOPS™ architecture, his research interests include representation of complex systems, strategies for visual modeling of concepts, preattentive viewing, and cognitive analysis of communication.
About the Talk
When exploring an information space, it is sometimes appropriate to display data using different structural paradigms, such as hierarchies or graphs, according to the demands of a given task. Developed from the CHEOPS™ approach, the Giza framework supports multiple views and provides many services to assist structural analysis or investigation.
Marc-Antoine and Luc demonstrated some of these services, and explained how Giza's flexibility was made possible through the use of a context object, that represents explicitly a given perspective on data, to modulate the coupling between the task, visualization tools and the data model.
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Interactive Graphics and Computer Animation at NRC in the 70's
May 21, 1998
About the Speakers
Nestor Burtnyk graduated from the University of Manitoba with a BSc in EE, and joined the Radio and Electrical Engineering Division of NRC in 1950. In the late 1960s, Mr. Burtnyk started work in interactive 3D computer graphics which led to his development of "key-frame animation" and other pioneering computer animation techniques. In 1975 Mr. Burtnyk became Head of the Computer Graphics Section and in 1980, as Manager of the Computer Technology Research Program, he initiated activities in intelligent robotics. From 1983-1991 Mr. Burtnyk was the Canadian representative for the International Cooperative Programme on Advanced Robotics (IARP). In 1990 Mr. Burtnyk returned to full-time research in the Autonomous Systems Lab of the newly formed Institute for Information Technology, working on supervisory control of telerobots based on range sensing and 3D vision. Mr. Burtnyk retired from active research at NRC in 1995.
Marceli Wein was born in Cracow, Poland, and immigrated to Canada in 1952. He received his Bachelor of Engineering degree from McGill University, followed by an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics. After working for Canadian Marconi, he joined the NRC in 1965. His research areas included graphics for simulation and graphics system architectures. He pioneered computer animation techniques with Nestor Burtnyk, resulting in their Academy Award for Technical Achievement in March 1997. Mr. Wein also spent two years as the Head of the Computer Graphics Section of the Division of Electrical Engineering of NRC, and served on many panels and committees, including working groups within the International Standards Organization which ultimately resulted in the Graphics Kernel System (GKS) and the Computer Graphics Metafile Standard (CGM).
About the Talk
In March 1997, Nestor and Marceli received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for their pioneering work in computer animation. Their talk reviewed the technical issues of these early developments.
In the late 1960's, Nestor Burtnyk worked at the NRC, developing techniques which would allow animators to produce creative work using a computer, but requiring no knowledge of programming. In 1970, he developed the "key frame animation" technique, allowing the generation of figurative animation from free-hand drawings.
He was joined by Marceli Wein to develop the technique, and to encourage its use by professional animators. One such film, 'Hunger', by Peter Foldes, was the first computer animated film to receive an Academy Award nomination, and won the the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973.
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"The Decade of the Arrow"
An Interactive Multimedia Database for High-Speed
Networks
April 16, 1998
About the Speaker
Victoria Dickenson is a graduate of the Museum Studies Programme at the University of Toronto and has over twenty-five years experience working in the Canadian and international museum community. She is currently Senior Advisor, Information Technology at the National Museum of Science and Technology Corporation in Ottawa. Victoria is a passionate advocate of the information highway and the promotion of public access to information. She obtained her PhD in Canadian history from Carleton University in 1995. Her thesis on the role of visual imagery in early science is being published by University of Toronto Press.
About the Talk
The National Aviation Museum in co-operation with Digital Renaissance of Toronto, has prepared a multimedia database on the Avro Arrow, a supersonic aircraft developed by A.V. Roe Canada in the 1950s. In summer 1997 Bell Canada embarked on a series of trials of high-speed networks that offer subscribers a chance to receive multimedia information, broadcasts, and community services on their personal computers or on a network computer hooked to their television set.
Victoria Dickenson described The Decade of the Arrow developed using HTML, Java, and Digital Renaissance's own TAG technology that permits 'tagging' of video, allowing users to search the database using a video interface. The Museum is particularly interested in the way in which users navigate the application, the ease with which time-based media interface with spatially organized databases, and the issues around use location (the "venue effect" recorded by museum researchers in 1994).
Did you know that museum goers and web surfers have almost identical demographic profile? This was just one of many interesting things we've learned from Victoria's presentation. The website which was the subject of the talk contains over 2GB of video clips, images, sound and text ... it is simply to large to be served over today's network. But keep checking the website of the Muesum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. They are in the process of digitizing a lot of their assets and will be providing them online soon!
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Designing for the Real World
March 17, 1998
About the Speaker
Austin Henderson is currently consulting in California. Until recently he was manager of Apple's Discourse Architecture Laboratory, and for many years prior to that he was at Xerox PARC working on tools and architectures for user interface design. He was co-chair of CHI'94 and is the author of numerous papers in the HCI literature.
About the Talk
As designers, we often have an instinctive view of the user, based on our assumptions about people, technology, usage, the purpose of activity, and their place in value systems. Austin suggests that this view is a very simplified fantasy. He presented six ways in which we need to enrich this view in order to deal with the reality of practice, and in order for our designs to address that reality. As designers we must expand our view to address the user's real situation, but not with the user's view of that real situation - the user's view is too narrowly focused.
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Web User Interface Design
February 17, 1998
About the Speaker
Roger Chang is a senior user interface designer and Web UI prime at Cognos Inc., a leading supplier of business intelligence software. He is currently concentrating on migrating Cognos' LAN client products to the WWW. Roger's previous work experience includes usability testing, IT consulting and web administration. He holds a B.Sc. in Psychology from Carleton University.
About the Talk
The WWW presents a challenge to the UI designer both in terms of its unique usability issues and technical design constraints. Roger presented some of the current thoughts on user interactions with Web enabled systems as well as covered the latest trends on the Internet. The aim of Roger's talk was to highlight some of the current theory and practice that will enable UI designers and Internet developers to best meet the Web consumers' needs.
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Use of Semantic Modeling in a User Interface Framework
January 20, 1998
About the Speaker
Kevin McGuire has spent seven years as software developer/project leader at Object Technology International Inc., focusing on development environments such as IBM's VisualAge for Java, GUI frameworks and support, and hypertext. He is completing a masters in computer science at Carleton. Kevin has previously participated in the Telepresence Project at the University of Toronto. His other research interests include chaos, information theory, emmergent behavior and artificial life.
About the Talk
Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications provide to the user a visualization of and access to a set of objects which model a problem domain. Although GUI frameworks exist which attempt to provide useful visual components, they tend not to help in describing and coordinating the relationship between the domain objects and their UI. As the size and complexity of the problem domain and ensuing size of the UI increases, development and maintenance problems become significant. In addition, it becomes very difficult to keep the all the views of the UI up to date with respect to state changes in the domain objects.
During the talk Kevin examined how the models produced from semantic modelling techniques such as Entity-Relationship modelling and the Object Modelling Technique can be explicitly used by a UI framework. The goal was a declarative approach to building a UI who's appearance and update semantics are described in terms of qualities of the domain objects.
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