Innovations in Visualization

Available Summer Projects in Innovis

The Innovis research group is looking for qualified students for this summer for a research topic in Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction. This is a research project. Candidates should have strong interests in both research, Human-Computer Interaction and Information Visualization.

If you are interested in the project below, please contact Prof. Sheelagh Carpendale (sheelagh @ ucalgary.ca) and Post-Doctoral researcher Jo Vermeulen (jo.vermeulen @ ucalgary.ca).

Project: FingerPrintVis

This projects consists of creating and studying the use of a mobile app and visualization that provides “fingerprints” of food products in terms of their nutritional data. The fingerprint visualization is designed to easily and quickly compare the nutritional data of two products, and leverages our ability to notice differences from the negative space.

The first step will be to port the existing visualization (Processing + Java code) to a smartphone platform such as Android. You will create a full-fledged mobile app, and integrate functionality to scan a barcode and look up the nutritional information in a database. In order to make the application work, you will also gather data and build a database of nutritional content of products commonly found in supermarkets that people would like to compare (e.g., we could start with multivitamin cereals). Finally, you will conduct a study of people using the smartphone app in a supermarket, to gather feedback about the visualization, and how (and whether) it helps people more readily compare nutritional information about the food products they buy.

The main requirement for this project is good to excellent knowledge and skills in programming (including creating and maintaining databases), information visualization and ideally (but not necessarily) existing knowledge in mobile app development. This project will be conducted under the supervision of and in collaboration with: