Design Thinking and Data Visualization

Date: 19 Nov 2014 (Wednesday)
Time: 6-7pm
Venue: LTK
Title: Design Thinking and Data Visualization

Abstract:

In this talk, I will first share my experience as a course instructor for IELM 4320 "design thinking", a joint-course between Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the China Academy of Arts (CAA). The course aims at bringing students from both art background and engineering and science background together and training them to "think like a designer and resolve constraints arising from technical, aesthetic, human factors and business concerns through hands-on exercises, presentations and case studies". The format is totally new in HKUST: twenty students from CAA and twenty students from HKUST spent 4 weeks to learn design skills and formed multi-disciplinary teams to design and develop a real product or team. The course has been offered in 2013 and 2014 summers and more than 10 students from the CSE department have attended the course and some of their projects will be presented.

In the second part of my talk, I will introduce data visualization and VisMOOC, a data visual analytics platform for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are becoming increasingly popular and have attracted much attention of both students and instructors. A lot of data can be collected from a MOOC course, including video clickstream, forum posts, and student grades. Analyzing the data can help instructors and education analysts gain insight into online learning behaviors. I will present VisMOOC, a web-based system we developed for analyzing data collected from MOOCs and share some new findings on learning behaviors of students taking MOOCs.

Biography:

Huamin Qu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His main research interests are in visualization and computer graphics. He has co-authored more than 70 refereed papers including 23 papers in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). He is on the steering committee of the IEEE Pacific Visualization Conferences and is an associate editor of IEEE TVCG. He has received 4 best paper/honorable mention awards and is a winner of 2009 IBM Faculty Award. He obtained a BS in Mathematics from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, an MS and a PhD (2004) in Computer Science from the Stony Brook University.