Multimedia and Visualisation
This group both explores and develops techniques to enhance users’ interaction with multimedia systems, and provides support for information discovery through novel methods of visual representation. The Multimedia and Visualisation group is led by Professor Jasna Kuljis.The multimedia theme covers two areas, semantic content modelling (SCM) and perceptual multimedia quality (PMQ). Work on semantic content modelling has resulted in the development of the Content Oriented Semantic Modelling Overlay Scheme and associated extensions. PMQ supports the continued take-up and proliferation of multimedia applications. In this, Drs Stephen Gulliver and George Ghinea were the first to apply eye tracking to examine multimedia video sequences, and they have also investigated novel methods for distributed multimedia quality from a user perspective.
The visualisation theme is concerned with spatial-semantic visualisation and virtual reality as well as their applications in text documents, program visualisation, and the presentation of medical data. An important line of investigation within the visualisation theme in the Multimedia and Visualisation sub-group concerns the discovery of the underlying structure of scientific knowledge domains and studies of human performance in relation to spatial-semantic visualisation and virtual reality, especially on text document visualisations. Within the visualisation theme, research has focused on the visualization of medical data, programs and document corpora and human factors associated with virtual reality displays. For example, Dr Timothy Cribbin has recently demonstrated how the quality of spatial-semantic document visualizations can be improved using proximity transformation methods, including graph-pruning and second-order similarity analysis. His other work has explored the strategies and performance of users navigating in spatial-semantic environments and when judging the similarity of documents. Dr Ghinea is investigating novel ways to visualise and record pain data in patients. Based on his work, clinicians now have a better understanding of how pain varies with time and how it is impacted upon by medication and therapy, whilst patients have a better realisation of the impact of their daily activities and medication timing/dosage on their pain experience. Cribbin and Kuljis have also both published in the area of knowledge domain visualization.
Our project highlights include:
- Dr George Ghinea has been funded to work on context-sensitive information architectures (EPSRC).
- Professor Jasna Kuljis has worked on experimentally testing the effects of diagrammatic notations on program flow comprehension and the visualisation of program specifications to automate the generation of programme code (EPSRC funded).
