Conference Papers Published

TeamBuilder: Visualization for Identifying Project Team Quality in Multi-variant Resources

Given known skill sets, schedules, and other employee / contractor information, we constructed an alrogithm to assemble various team options that met user specificed criteria. The user specified requirements contained hard constraints, such as time, person-hours of certain skill sets by certain time deadlines, availability of a resource, etc, and soft constraints such as wanting to avoid travel for certain resources. There were additional hidden constraints, that could not be encoded due to political reasons, such as what people dislike each other. Dealing with these required user interaction with the suggested teams. Due to the vast number of resources available effective suggestion and visualization was required to allow managers to make good team choices. This was published at the Midwest Artificial Intelligence Cognitive Science conference in 2008.

Generic Thumbnails for Web Searching

This project used color-coded and HTML rendering to create a thumbnail that did not violate copyrights from a given web page. This thumbnail was colored and structured based in part on the user entered query, to allow for faster human processing of search results. It required the implementation of an HTML processor to deduce the structural properties of a page, and then the implementation of an indexer to allow the storage of structure and positional information in addition to the usual content, such as keywords, stored in a web index. This was published at Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering conference in 2007.

Presentations

HTTP Optimization

This presentation was about ongoing research into a simple modification to the HTTP/1.1 protocol to grant significant speed increases. The work shows promise to be capable of producing similar results to SPDY by Google, but with significantly less implementation cost, and more backwards compatibility. It also offers assistance for dealing with overloaded systems, a feature not available with comparable proposals. The presentation was made at Western Kentucky University.

Visualization and Data Analysis Techniques

I presented results for commercial work and research projects related to visualization and data analysis, with a particular focus on the general techniques used between projects, the importance and impact of quality visualization, and a post moterm analysis of a diverse range of visualization projects and feedback from the people who used them to accomplish their goals. The presentation was made at the Cumberland conference at Western Kentucky University.

A Genetic Algorithm for the Computation of Network Survivability

We constructed a genetic algorithm to yeild efficient, accurate solutions to a provably computationally intractable problem. The problem was the assignment of work to nodes in a graph to ensure that a certain amount of work could be completed by a connected subset of the graph, in the presence of possible failure - the probability of which was described by an increasing function that has otherwise unknown properties. This was presented at an IPFW undergraduate research seminar.