Autodesk TED BigViz

I'm a big fan of TED conference talks. In most cases the presenter are very smart people, which know how to tell a story and make inspiring presentations. My favourit talks include Hans Rosling talk about "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen, Golan Levin about "The truly soft side of software", Joshua Prince-Ramus about "Designing the Seattle Central Library", Seth Godin about "Sliced bread and other marketing delights", John Maeda about "Simplicity patterns" or Jonathan Harris on "The Web's secret stories".
In this years TED conference AutoDesk made a technology experiment called BigViz. The experiment is an exploration in the visualization of the Big Ideas presented on the TED conference. David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, two visual cartographers, captured more than 700 sketches highlighting memorable quotes, great questions and unexpected connections. All this was done on wacom tablets and transfered simultaneously to the Autodesk BigViz system for later exploration. The BigViz system is an interactive system that allows to record scratches and work on them in a visual collaborative environment, which can be used intuitively. Combined with a multitouch display, the system demonstrates how future collaboration could look like. The visualizations are also available as 200 pages pdf download.

Reference

• http://autodesk.com/ted2008

Skews and Blews

Microsoft Research will present another interesting research project at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2008 (ICWSM). Blews (blogs and news) is a another tool to visualize blog topics in the political part of the blogosphere. Therefore it categorizes and visualizes blog topics according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps. The data is aggregated in real time from Live Microsoft Labs Social Media platform and consist of a link analysis and text analysis of political blog posts.
I am very interested to read how the authors of the paper define the emotional charge of a discussion.

Reference

• http://research.microsoft.com/projects/blews/

How to grow your own company

The presentation got my attention on two different levels. First I always liked the presentation style of Nancy Duarte and her Design Company Duarte Design. This presentation is another example of her professional skills to enhance her presentation with visuals that support her talk. The presentation is smooth and doesn't distract you with to many facts from the actual talk, while still providing some more information than the pure talk.
On the other hand I found it very interesting to see how she explained the growth of her company. The problems she struggled with and how she solved it. I really enjoyed watching the talk. But this is just the beginning of the full talk she is giving on the changes shes is experiencing in the business of presentation professionals. She carefully selected recent trends and present insightful thoughts on how different changes affect the presentation style and methods. The shifts she is explaining are:

• Global Economy
• Prolific Devices
• Social Networking
• Technology Advances
• Virtual Tradeshows
• Hollywood

Click read more to see the whole presentation.

Reference

• http://www.duarte.com/

Microsoft Research Report on IM usage

Microsoft Research just released a very interesting research report "Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network" on the usage of Instant Messenger Usage. The anonymized study analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people, from which a communication graph with 130 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges has been constructed. The data for the analyzed dataset was gathered within 30 days in June 2006 and includes three main data sets:

1. user demographic information
2. time and user stamped events describing the presence of a particular user
3. communication session logs

which have been used to conduct the analysis.

Reference

• Microsoft Research Publications

New York City Talk Exchange

This project from the MIT senseable city lab visualizes in real time the flow of IP (Internet Protocol) data within New York City and between New York and cities around the world. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow. The project will be displayed on an exibition at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art Design and Elastic Mind from February 24th - May 12th 2008.

Reference

• http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/visuals.html