Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences member Selim Balcısoy’s work on a Visual Exploratory Tool for Narrative Generation for Big Data received IBM’s Global Faculty Award. This award is given to few scientists every year based on the influence and quality of their research.
We spoke to Balcısoy about his award and research:
What is your area of research?
My academic studies focus on the visualization of big data, visual analysis, and augmented reality. I specifically focus on deriving narratives from big data and physical visualization of data.
Can you talk about your award-winning project?
The idea for this project came from work I did with Project 102 students and a student team making their graduation projects last year. I compiled the conclusions of these studies in a single list and applied to IBM with the Visual Exploratory Tool for Narrative Generation for Big Data project.
The purpose of the project is to visualize the leading characters and the relationships between characters and times or places. We based our work on Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence and Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.
First, I asked approximately 35 students in the Project 102 course to read Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence and prepare infographics about it. The image below is that of one of the best (for Museum of Innocence) and you can view all works here.
With my graduation project groups, we did research on how similar infographics can be generated automatically or semiautomatically. An academic paper we wrote with a group of students was accepted to IEEE VAST 2014, the globally most prestigious conference in the field, as a Poster Presentation. The conference was held in Paris in November, and my students and I attended.
I must thank Erk Ediz Akyigit, Tuğkan Cengiz and Onur Burak Yıldırım for their selfless work in this project. You can view the video presentation here and a screenshot is below:
I presented the above work in two seminars in October; one in IBM Research’s Almaden Research Center, and one in CMU’s Menlo Park campus. I am preparing TÜBİTAK and H2020 project on this subject, and the same group of students and I are expanding the article into a journal entry.
How can you comment on the contribution of this award to your work?
First and foremost, it was a great motivator. The fact that the research we conduct with undergraduate students in particular support projects that are deemed worthy of such awards shows how realistic our school’s research objectives are regarding undergraduate students. This award has spurred me to do more high-impact, comprehensive projects with undergraduate students in the future.