Ohad Fried will present his General Exam on Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 3pm in Rm. 402. The members of his/her committee are Adam Finkelstein (advisor), Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Jianxiong Xiao. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: --------- Collections of objects such as images are often presented visually in a grid because it is a compact representation that lends itself well for search and exploration. Most grid layouts are sorted using very basic criteria, such as date or filename. We present a method to arrange collections of objects respecting an arbitrary distance measure. Pairwise distances are preserved as much as possible, while still producing the specific target arrangement which may be a 2D grid, the surface of a sphere, a hierarchy, or any other shape. We show that our method can be used for infographics, collection exploration, summarization, data visualization, and sound exploration. We present a fast algorithm that can work on large collections and quantitatively evaluate how well distances are preserved. Reading List: ------------- Book: Computer Graphics with OpenGL, 4th Ed., Hearn, Baker, and Carithers. Prentice Hall, 2010. ISBN: 978-0136053583. Papers: TENENBAUM, J. B., DE SILVA, V., AND LANGFORD, J. C. 2000. A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Science (New York, N.Y.) 290, 5500 (Dec.), 2319–23. ROWEIS, S. T., AND SAUL, L. K. 2000. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction by locally linear embedding. Science 290, 5500 (Dec.), 2323–6. XING, E. P., NG, A. Y., JORDAN, M. I., AND RUSSELL, S. 2003. Distance metric learning, with application to clustering with side-information. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15, 505–512. QUADRIANTO, N., SMOLA, A. J., SONG, L., AND TUYTELAARS, T. 2010. Kernelized sorting. Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 32, 10 (Oct.), 1809–21. KUHN, H. 1955. The Hungarian Method for The Assignment Problem. Naval research logistics quarterly 2, 83–87. HUANG, S.-S., SHAMIR, A., SHEN, C.-H., ZHANG, H., SHEFFER, A., HU, S.-M., AND COHEN-OR, D. 2013. Qualitative organization of collections of shapes via quartet analysis. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 32(4). PLANT, W., AND SCHAEFER, G. 2010. Image Retrieval On The Honeycomb Image Browser. 17th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). SCHOEFFMANN, K., AND AHLSTROM, D. 2011. Similarity-Based Visualization for Image Browsing Revisited. International Symposium on Multimedia (Dec.), 422–427. TZANETAKIS, G., BENNING, M. S., NESS, S. R., MINIFIE, D., AND LIVINGSTON, N. 2009. Assistive music browsing using self-organizing maps. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments - PETRA ’09, 1–7.