FP-YutaMorimoto

From CS294-10 Visualization Fa08

Proposal

Adaptive Calendar

Group Member

Yuta Morimoto

Motivation

All students at UC Berkeley must register classes to maintain academic status. Before starting new semester, they check the courses they want to take and make their schedule. Every student find classes by using The Online Schedule of Classes[1] and obtain their information such as the following features:

Course Title/No
Instructor
Time and Location
Units/Credit
Enrollment/Wait list

The Online Schedule of Classes provides enough function to make their class calendar. However, they require users a text-base query so that they lack interaction with users. Moreover, information obtained by the query is not succinct. So, I would like to improve the scheduler with visualization method.

Description

First of all, Since what I would like to make is a scheduler, I must make something schedule. This scheduler need to represent several classes held at the same time. Since users need to make their schedule considering conflict with classes. That is the same situation in a conference that has concurrent session. I think some scheduler do not care about the event occurring at the same time. So, I would like to implement the solution to this conflict using distinguishable features of visualization such like color or shape.

Second, I think that all classes contain other information such as Course Description and Course No but Time and Location. So, I should allow users to compare classes by using the information to make decision.

I think I can represent each object as a vertex in a hierarchical tree structure to choose a courses. After choosing the courses, the user need to adjust own schedule not to conflict with other courses or his/her demand. So, I want to realize the two perspective on the courses. One perspective should relate schedule and another relate other aspects.

Related work

As I mentioned, each class has compound features and can be regarded as an object composition. Those features have ordinal features such like course NO and nominal ones like course description. To obtain more insight of this problems, I checked related work such like Telebears[2] Waterloo Course Override [3]

1. Bederson, B. B., Clamage, A., Czerwinski, M. P., and Robertson, G. G. 2004. DateLens: A fisheye calendar interface for PDAs. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 11, 1 (Mar. 2004), 90-119. [4]

2. Dachselt, R. and Weiland, M. 2006. TimeZoom: a flexible detail and context timeline. In CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 682-687. [5]

Mile Stone

I plan to implement this visualization software as follow:

Choosing hierarchical class view with interaction
Implementation of week calendar
Implementation of online retrieve for actual usage (optional)

If there is a time to implement, I would like to make online information search. Fortunately, I found method to query general catalog "Building Search Links into the Online Schedule of Classes" So, I can implement the visualization using latest database. But it may not be important aspect of the visualization.