General Information:

The e-POLICY projects main aim is to support policy makers in their decision process across a multi-disciplinary effort aimed at engineering the policy making life-cycle. For the first time, global and individual perspectives on the decision process are merged and integrated. The project focuses on regional planning and promotes the assessment of economic, social and environmental impacts during the policy making process http://www.epolicy-project.eu/

My Tasks:

At Fraunhofer IGD Darmstadt I created a visual-interactive Web-application to connect the optimization, simulation and opinion mining modules. This was realized with the Google Web Toolkit. Tomcat was used to deploy the application and communicate with the external modules. The frontend was designed with SmartGWT and the visualizations were made with D3.js. View the demo here.

Publications:

Visual access to optimization problems in strategic environmental assessment. T. Ruppert, J. Bernard, A. Ulmer, A. Kuijper, and J. Kohlhammer. In International Symposium on Visual Computing ISVC, LNCS. Springer, 2013.

Visual access to an agent-based simulation model to support political decision making. T. Ruppert, J. Bernard, A. Ulmer, H. Lucke-Tieke, and J. Kohlhammer. In Proceedings of of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, i-KNOW. ACM, 2014 (accepted for publication).

General Information:

The VisInfo project - Visual Access to Research Data – aims to develop innovative approaches for interactive, graphical access to research data in digital libraries. The goal of the project therefore is the development and prototypical implementation of innovative approaches for interactive, graphical access to research data, to present it in the information retrieval process and make it searchable in the best possible way. The project currently focuses on content-based visual search and presentation of time-oriented data of primary research data from earth and climate sciences.http://www.vis-info.info/

My Tasks:

At Fraunhofer IGD Darmstadt I created a visual-interactive Web-application based on the Java prototype which was developed previously. This was realized with the Google Web Toolkit. Tomcat was used to deploy the application from where I accessed the data which was stored in a MySQL database. The frontend was designed with SmartGWT and the timeseries visualizations were made with GWT Highcharts. View the demo here.

General Information:

Physically based animation was a course at TU Darmstadt with a programming project. In groups of 2-4 students we had to create our own simulation engine in C++.

Our Tasks:

• - Create a C++ project with CMake
• - Include the libraries: AntTweakbar, Glut, Glew, Eigen
• - Build an integrator with multiple integration techniques
• - Build and simulate:
• - A solar system
• - Head with hair
• - Piece of cloth which is hung up
• - Deformable objects
• - Add collision detection and response

General Information:

Virtual and Augmented Reality was a course at TU Darmstadt with a programming project. In groups of 2-4 students we had to create a project which tackles common problems of virtual and augmented reality. We decided to build an Android app which uses sensor fusion to properly estimate the direction the mobile device is pointing in. With this information we made a game where the player has to watch through the camera of his device and shoot ducks which maintain their position in the real world. This forces the player to move to be able to find ducks and shoot them.

Our Tasks:

• - Create an Android project and readout the sensor data from the mobile device
• - Make a sensor fusion to have a stable signal
• - Design an application interface
• - Add sounds for multiple events
• - Make use of possible interactions with the touchscreen

General Information:

Serious Games was a project course at TU Darmstadt. In groups of 2-4 students we had to work on different projects. We chose to create a visual analysis tool for mentoring collaborative multiplayer games. Therefore we created a log file format which our software is able to process and then display with the ability to interact with the data. The use case was a game called "Escape from Wilson Island" where 4 players had to work together to survive and build a boat to leave the island.

Our Tasks:

• - Integrate a log file writer into the game
• - Parse the log files and store the data efficiently
• - Create a visual interactive user interface in C#
• - Make use of the geographical data
• - Display important events
• - Integrate filtering options
• - Animate temporal data

General Information:

Computer Vision I & II are courses at TU Darmstadt with programming exercises for groups of two students. We had to implement basic and advanced image processing and vision algorithms with Matlab.

Our Tasks:

• - Perform image sharpening with Gaussian and Laplacian image pyramids
• - Detect points of interest in an image by implementing a Harris feature detector
• - Classify data with linear support vector machines
• - Classify images with a bag of visual words approach
• - Realize image denoising and in-painting with Markov random fields
• - Track a moving object in a video using Kalman filter

General Information:

Computer Graphics I & II are courses at TU Darmstadt with programming exercises for groups of 3-4 students. We had to implement basic and advanced algorithms in C++ using OpenGL.

Our Tasks:

• - Implement different shading techniques
• - Generate random terrain with skyboxes, culling and texturing
• - Perform basic ray tracing
• - Use interval arithmetics for ray casting of implicit surfaces
• - Reconstruct a mesh out of volumetric data with the marching cubes algorithm
• - Boost marching cubes with octrees
• - Run volume ray casting with shading on the GPU